14 DAY TRIAL // Nowadays, the world is trying to bring Internet access more or less everywhere, but there are remote locations where broadband doesn't work that well, or at all.
The means for bringing wireless network signals to mountains and such are called “multi-hop networks” and have a tight limit on how much data is transmitted.
Researchers from the North Carolina State University now claim that they have found a way to increase the data amount by 20 to 80 percent.
Multi-hop wireless networks function by forwarding and receiving data between multiple nodes.
“Hot spots” are those places in the network where multiple wireless transmissions can interfere with each other. This is where the data limit comes from, as the nodes have to take turns transmitting data.
Dr. Rudra Dutta, an associate professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research, and Ph.D. student Parth Pathak have developed an approach called centrality-based power control.
“Our approach increases the average amount of data that can be transmitted within the network by at least 20 percent for networks with randomly placed nodes – and up to 80 percent if the nodes are positioned in clusters within the network,” says Dr. Rudra Dutta.
Essentially, an algorithm instructs each node on how much power each transmission should use depending on the final destination.
This gives precedence to powerful transmissions and swaps between strong and less powerful ones, even increasing energy efficiency in the process. In other words, the data limit is left the same, but the efficiency is drastically heightened.
The US Army sponsored the research, hoping to get a hold of a technology that will make their battery-powered, portable equipment more useful. The research can have applications on a much broader scale though. Alas, there is no telling how soon the milestone will start having an effect on the world.