CSpy: Finding the Best Quality Channel without Probing

Wireless performance depends directly on the quality of the channel. A wireless transmitter can improve its performance by estimating and transmitting on only the strongest channel, which can be of significantly higher quality than a weak channel (yielding up to 100% rate improvement). It is considered impossible to predict the quality of the unseen channels. Thus, the only way to identify the strongest channel is by probing each channel individually, incurring large overheads. The key contribution of this paper is a discovery of previously unobserved properties of the wireless channel that makes it possible to predict the strongest of a set of channels from the measurements collected only on a single channel. We confirm the properties through measurements and present a theoretical analysis that explains their nature. Our proposed system, CSpy, utilizes these observations to predict the strongest channel. CSpy is the first to reliably estimate the strongest channel by utilizing channel responses extracted from off-the-shelf wireless chipsets, without probing any additional channels. By tracking the strongest channel, CSpy improves performance by up to 100% in comparison to channel agnostic schemes.