'WiPrint' - 3D-Printing Your Wireless Coverage

Wireless signals are everywhere. Directing them to conform to custom physical boundaries improves the performance, security, and privacy of a wireless system, but current solutions like directional antennas can be bulky and expensive for ordinary users. A team from Dartmouth College  proposes "WiPrint," a novel approach to customizing wireless signal maps using 3D-printed glossy reflectors. The team says their solution is easily manufactured and adapts easily to different environments. The WiPrint system is highly flexible, as it does not require adding additional APs or moving the AP to new locations, providing consumers with an intuitive and novel solution to performance and security problems.

Transcript

00:00:07 most Wi-Fi routers propagate electromagnetic signals omnidirectionally this property of Wireless propagation can be the source of both performance and security problems in one scenario Wireless performance can be negatively affected if the path between the router and the receiver is heavily obstructed directing Wireless signals to

00:00:28 move in a more direct trajectory towards the receiver is a simple way to increase Wireless performance in another scenario if the router is close to a window a malicious third party could easily engage in packet sniffing resulting in stolen data or identity theft directing Wireless signals away from the window and towards authorized areas can provide Access Control at the physical layer of

00:00:52 the network unfortunately existing Solutions like directional antennas are expensive buky and difficult for regular consumers to use we were inspired by anecdotal experiments where soda cans could be applied to routers as a means of directing Wireless signals in a residential environment we present y

00:01:15 print a system designed to create glossy reflectors that can be mounted on consumer routers and used to direct signals to form arbitrary Wireless passions the user only has to specify an environment in set of regions where they would like the signal to improve and a set of regions where they would like the signal to decrease with a click of a button y print will produce a carefully

00:01:38 optimized reflector shape which can then be fabricated with the aid of a 3D printer we then cover the reflector with the reflective material like a luminous them to finish the fabrication [Music] process here is one of our preliminary results in this environment we specify these two rooms to have an increased signal and these two rooms to have a

00:02:18 decreased signal here is a heat map of the wireless signal before a reflector has been applied and here is a wireless heat map after our generated reflector has been applied as you can see we are successful in achieving all of our objectives our system can easily adapt to different environments and wireless

00:02:41 parameters the Y print system is significant in the feud of Wireless networking as it provides users with an intuitive and novel solution to performance at security [Music] problems