D-MIMOO - Distributed MIMO for Office Wi-Fi Networks with Multi-Antenna Devices

We present D-MIMOO, a distributed MIMO Wi-Fi architecture that boosts average network throughput compared to state-of-the-art access points with co-located antennas. Designing a distributed MIMO system invites us to redesign fundamental Wi-Fi concepts, such as carrier sensing multiple access (CSMA) which governs channel access among Wi-Fi access points. We also propose a novel way of using channel reciprocity and the network topology to select downlink MU-MIMO recipients. The proposed solutions do not require modifications at the user equipment and hence will work with legacy 802.11ac devices. We compare the performance of the D-MIMOO architecture to a state-of-the-art dense enterprise Wi-Fi deployment, demonstrating a 3x improvement in average downlink network throughput.