GapSense aims to reduce wireless interference

The popularity of wireless devices - from WiFi laptops to Bluetooth headsets - is increasingly clogging the airwaves, resulting in dropped calls, wasted bandwidth and botched connections.

The new software being developed at the University of Michigan aims to control the traffic and dramatically reduce interference.

The software, GapSense, lets these devices that can't normally talk to one another exchange simple stop and warning messages so their communications collide less often.

GapSense creates a common language of energy pulses and gaps. The length of the gaps conveys the stop or warning message. Devices could send them at the start of a communication, or in between information packets to let other gadgets in the vicinity know about their plans.

"All these devices are supposed to perform their designated functions but they're using the same highway and fighting for space," said Kang Shin, the Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science at U-M.

"Since they don't have a direct means of communicating with each other because they use different protocols, we thought, 'How can we coordinate them so that each can perform their functions while minimising interference with the others?'" Shin said in a statement.

The researchers tested GapSense and found that it could reduce interference by more than 88 per cent on some networks with diverse devices.

At moderate WiFi traffic, the researchers detected around 40 per cent collision rate between wider - and narrower-bandwidth devices and GapSense reduced it to virtually zero.

GapSense could also reduce energy consumption of WiFi devices by 44 per cent. It would accomplish this by allowing the WiFi receiver to operate at low clock rates.

Shin and Xinyu Zhang, a former doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer science, will present the work at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications in Turin, Italy.

The university is now seeking commercialisation partners to help bring the technology to market.