Many small businesses and public areas offer free Wi-Fi access, but may wish to restrict network access only to their customers or patrons inside the physical property. Unfortunately, due to the nature of wireless networks, this is difficult to accomplish. We develop and implement CLAC, a Crowdsourced Location aware Access Control scheme using physical layer information to address this challenge. It crowdsources both channel state information (CSI) and received signal strength (RSS) of already validated users to classify future users. We propose and use two CSI metrics in CLAC: CSI Cross-Antenna Stability Metric and CSI Cross-Frame Stability Metric, which summarize well the spatial and temporal CSI characteristics respectively. CLAC is evaluated in an office and a classroom. Evaluation results show that CLAC performs well in both environments, allowing most valid users inside the area to access the network, while the chance that invalid users outside the boundary may access the network is small.

In recent years, Wi-Fi has seen extraordinary growth; however, due to the cost, performance and security issues, many Wi-Fi hotspot owners would like to restrict the network access only to individuals inside the physical property. Unfortunately, due to the nature of wireless, this is difficult to accomplish, especially with the off-the-shelf omni-antenna devices. In this work, we develop and implement CLaWa, a Crowdsourced Location Aware Wi-Fi Access Control scheme to address this challenge. Our system is based on observations of differing characteristics of physical layer information across physical boundaries such as walls and corners. CLaWa crowdsources both channel state information (CSI) and received signal strength (RSS) of already validated users to classify future users. We have also selected an appropriate machine learning algorithm for CLaWa. Evaluation results show that CLaWa can identify the boundary around a given area precisely, thus granting network access only to users inside the area while not validating users outside the boundary. Compared to indoor localization schemes, CLaWa is a lightweight solution which does not require expensive localization operations.

Providing adequate Wi-Fi services to meet user demand in densely populated environments has been a fundamental challenge for Wi-Fi networks. In this paper, we explore the emerging OAMI (One-AP-Multiple-Interface) architecture and propose a unique solution called SAP (Smart Access Point). SAP takes full advantage of the OAMI architecture to provide seamless handoff experience to users, while smartly balancing the network load across multiple interfaces based on users' time-varying traffic load conditions. Moreover, we define a Traffic Fulfillment (TF) performance metric to quantify the user experience and aid in association scheduling. SAP is an AP-only solution that requires trivial network modifications and is backwards compatible with legacy 802.11 stations. We have implemented SAP in the MadWifi device driver and demonstrated its effectiveness via experiments.