Homes can include complex networking environments with numerous devices utilizing the wireless spectrum in countless ways. In addition to the streaming and gaming applications which have become common-place, homes are increasingly becoming filled with a growing number of devices such as cameras, health and motion sensors, thermostats, etc. Unless a home is located in the “middle of nowhere,” it is more than likely that neighboring home Wi-Fi networks can “step on each other's feet”, e.g., associated network flows from different networks can interfere with each other, heavily affecting performance. The same can apply for businesses and other networking environments including vehicles, etc.
Many homes can have an overlapping Wi-Fi neighbor. Dispersed wireless home-network devices can be exposed to neighboring networks which are immeasurable from a single location. Periods of poor performance can be attributed to neighboring Wi-Fi transmitters. In addition to the dense private Wi-Fi deployments, a majority of networks use a single Wi-Fi channel. This indicates that the majority of home access points (APs) use a static Wi-Fi configuration, and are never re-assigned by residents after they are deployed.
Various methods to improve the performance of wireless networks include coordination and scheduling, resource sharing, deploying multiple in, multiple out (MIMO) algorithms, etc. Common to these efforts is that they address the problems in the context of managed, often also called enterprise, wireless networks. In such networks, all the APs are managed by a single authority, which certainly enables the deployment of collaborative protocols at different APs. While these methods are valuable in the managed network scenarios that they were designed for, they are inapplicable in many home network environments where each AP is individually managed by its owner.