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LAVA: fine-grained 3D indoor wireless coverage for small IoT devices

Authors:

R. Ivan Zelaya,

William Sussman,

Jeremy Gummeson,

Wenjun HuAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

Pages 123 - 136

https://doi.org/10.1145/3452296.3472890

Published: 09 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Small IoT devices deployed in challenging locations suffer from uneven 3D coverage in complex environments. This work optimizes indoor coverage with LAVA, a Large Array of Vanilla Amplifiers. LAVA is a standard-agnostic cooperative mesh of elements, i.e., RF devices each consisting of several switched input and output antennas connected to fixed-gain amplifiers. Each LAVA element is further equipped with rudimentary power sensing to detect nearby transmissions. The elements report power readings to the LAVA control plane, which then infers active link sessions without explicitly interacting with the endpoint transmitter or receiver. With simple on-off control of amplifiers and antenna switching, LAVA boosts passing signals via multi hop amplify-and-forward. LAVA explores a middle ground between smart surfaces and physical-layer relays. Multi-hopping over short inter-hop distances exerts more control over the end-to-end trajectory, supporting fine-grained coverage and spatial reuse. Ceiling testbed results show throughput improvements to individual Wi-Fi links by 50% on average and up to 100% at 15 dBm transmit power (193% on average, up to 8x at 0 dBm). ZigBee links see up to 17 dB power gain. For pairs of co-channel concurrent links, LAVA provides average per-link throughput improvements of 517% at 0 dBm and 80% at 15 dBm.

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Cited By

Pan HQiu L(2025)Passive Metasurface-Based Low Earth Orbit Ground Station DesignTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2023.901015730:1(148-160)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2023.9010157
Chen NQiu TSi WWu D(2025)DAiMo: Motif Density Enhances Topology Robustness for Highly Dynamic Scale-Free IoTIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.349200224:3(2360-2375)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2024.3492002
Ma RQiu LHu W(2024)SurfOS: Towards an Operating System for Programmable Radio EnvironmentsProceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3696348.3696861(132-141)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696348.3696861
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

LAVA: fine-grained 3D indoor wireless coverage for small IoT devices
1. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
    1. Wireless devices
2. Networks
  1. Network components
    1. Physical links
  2. Network types
    1. Wireless access networks
      1. Wireless local area networks

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

August 2021

868 pages

ISBN:9781450383837

DOI:10.1145/3452296

General Chairs:
Fernando Kuipers
Delft University of Technology
,
Matthew Caesar
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Published: 09 August 2021

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August 23 - 27, 2021

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Cited By

Pan HQiu L(2025)Passive Metasurface-Based Low Earth Orbit Ground Station DesignTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2023.901015730:1(148-160)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2023.9010157
Chen NQiu TSi WWu D(2025)DAiMo: Motif Density Enhances Topology Robustness for Highly Dynamic Scale-Free IoTIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.349200224:3(2360-2375)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2024.3492002
Ma RQiu LHu W(2024)SurfOS: Towards an Operating System for Programmable Radio EnvironmentsProceedings of the 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks10.1145/3696348.3696861(132-141)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696348.3696861
Do HLee N(2024)Finding Globally Optimal Configuration of Active RIS in Linear TimeIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications10.1109/TWC.2024.346230723:12(18142-18153)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TWC.2024.3462307
Liu KTian ZLi ZWan X(2022)A Non-Line-of-Sight Wireless Indoor Localization System Using Custom-Designed Radio Relay and Uniform Circular ArrayIEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation10.1109/TAP.2022.319122270:11(11045-11058)Online publication date: Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TAP.2022.3191222

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