Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gipsies 4759 days ago
Even with enough MIMO 802.11n devices it's still practically impossible. They essentially need access to the raw signals to do all their calculations, but this isn't provided by drivers/firmware/devices.

If you're really lucky you have a device with open source firmware [1]. However even that firmware can only interface with the PHY layer by writing to registers to change the configuration of the device. Essentially the modulation of the signals is done in hardware, and you only control MAC aspects of it (things like disabling carrier sense is possible, changing backoff behavior, inter-frame wait timings, etc). But you can't access the real signal, it's a hardware limitation, so this not possible using existing devices.

[1] https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware