Topology reconfiguration in Wi-Fi home networks

The use of Wi-Fi is booming in home networks and it is making it harder for the technology to cope with this exponential growth. The high-bandwidth requirement of streaming services, data backups and interactive cloud applications require solutions to improve the performance of the network while simultaneously simplifying its management. This paper unveils a new Wi-Fi management paradigm relying on dynamic network topology reconfiguration that adjusts the network topology to its traffic matrix, and mitigates the performance pitfalls inherent to Wi-Fi and its fixed topology. A linear programming formulation relying on cross-layer information is provided to assess the potential gains of such solution, and an evaluation is performed that explores the achievable performance and range extension gains. The simulation results show a significant increase in the wireless network capacity - up to two fold - as well as improvements in the network range.