Effect of Adopting Indoor Positioning on Wi-Fi System Performance

Recently, a new Indoor Positioning System (IPS) was introduced. It is based on establishing two orthogonal phased antenna arrays to target a specific location at any point in time. To enable simultaneous data transfer through the original Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) functionality, this paper proposes a new Space-Division Multiple Access (SDMA) scheme. Several aspects of a simulation utility have been added to accommodate the structure of the specific wave transmission. Limited simulation analysis is included to start evaluating data throughput in addition to lost MAC frames and compare them with the baseline of the conventional Carrier-Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) in Wi-Fi, The paper discusses findings from two simulation scenarios, conventional Wi-Fi system, as a benchmark, and combined SDMA/CSMA Wi-Fi, regarding a Wi-Fi communication system. The intent of the comparison is to measure the data throughput in the presence of IPS. Surprisingly, the comparison reveals that the throughput in the second scenario is double that of the first scenario. Moreover, the lost MAC frames are seen to be less in the second scenario than those of the first scenario, highlighting the effectiveness of the new IPS technique. With future study underway of including a variety of practical conditions in terms of the random number of stations in the indoor hall as well as different hall layouts and dimensions, the data throughput in addition to the lost frames enhancement/ degradation is yet to be determined.