A smart surface for smart devices

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MIT News Office
A smart surface for smart devices

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Rather than focusing on the transmitters and receivers, what if we could amplify the signal by adding antennas to an external surface in the environment itself?
That’s the idea behind the CSAIL team’s new system RFocus, a software-controlled “smart surface” that uses more than 3,000 antennas to maximize the strength of the signal at the receiver.
The antennas are inexpensive because they don’t process the signal at all; they merely control how it is reflected.
Lead author Venkat Arun says that the project represents what is, to the team’s knowledge, the largest number of antennas ever used for a single communication link.
MIT Professor Hari Balakrishnan says that systems for that type of scale would normally be prohibitively expensive and/or power-intensive, but could be possible with a low-power interconnected system that uses an approach like RFocus.
“The core goal here was to explore whether we can use elements in the environment and arrange them to direct the signal in a way that we can actually control,” says Balakrishnan, senior author on a new paper about RFocus that will be presented next month at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) in Santa Clara, California.
“If you want to have wireless devices that transmit at the lowest possible power, but give you a good signal, this seems to be one extremely promising way to do it.”
RFocus is a two-dimensional surface composed of thousands of antennas that can each either let the signal through or reflect it.
The state of the elements is set by a software controller that the team developed with the goal of maximizing the signal strength at a receiver.
“The biggest challenge was determining how to configure the antennas to maximize signal strength without using any additional sensors, since the signals we measure are very weak,” says PhD student Venkat Arun, lead author of the new paper alongside Balakrishnan

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