NxWLAN: Towards transparent and secure usage of neighbors' access points in residential WLANs

The increased popularity of IEEE 802.11 LANs (WLANs) in residential (home) environments leads to dense, unplanned and thus chaotic deployments. Access Points (APs) are frequently deployed unfavorably in terms of radio coverage and use interfering frequency/power settings. In fact, in some parts of a one's apartment the usage of the neighbor's AP might be preferred as it might provide better signal quality than the own AP. Moreover, the network performance could be dramatically improved by balancing the network load over spatially co-located neighbor APs operating on different radio channels or having asymmetric workloads. We address these problems by presenting NxWLAN (Neighborhood extensible WLAN) which enables the secure virtual extension of user's home WLANs in residential environments through enabling the usage of neighboring APs operating on the same or on different radio channels. NxWLAN requires no additional software to be installed on the client STAs while providing the same level of security as the home AP, e.g. WPA2, without revealing any kind of security credentials to untrusted neighboring APs. In this paper we prove, by prototyping and simulating the NxWLAN solution, that it is operational, performant and easy to deploy using off-the-shelf hardware. Moreover, we provide the full source code of our prototype to the community as open-source.