nVoy (IEEE 1905.1) to Rescue WiFi

WiFi often has problems. The more vast the intended coverage area, the more troublesome the technology is. Many of us experience this at our own homes. The range of a single AP is often not enough. Adding a second AP makes things even worse, because (as of today) none of the consumer OS platforms supports WiFi roaming properly. The only cure at the moment seems to be a professional WiFi installation (like the Ubiquiti UniFi, which actively kicks out clients on poor connections forcing them to reconnect to another AP).

WiFi is problematic for home users, but it is a nightmare for service providers. Majority of support issues handled by the call centers are WiFi - related. Users can withstand refreshing a page on a tablet computer, but a choking video stream is utterly annoying.

The underlying problem is the lack of redundancy / aggregation at the MAC Layer. Networking protocols such as UDP (Layer 3) and higher work only over a single Layer 2 route at a time. Even worse, the active interface selection algorithm is flawed. Say my Windows PC is connected to the Internet over LAN via a hub and the WiFi connection is active too (on the same network). Now when I disconnect the uplink end of the wired hub, Windows will not re-route the traffic to WiFi unless I disconnect the LAN cable from the computer, forcing the LAN interface to go down (because as long as the link is up, it *thinks* the wired connection is faster, even if it does not work...).

IEEE 1905.1 (formal name) and nVoy (marketing name) is designed to help home users with connectivity, adding a MAC abstraction layer (Layer 2.5) between the current MAC (Layer 2) and networking (Layer 3). This - in short - brings two most wanted features to local (and especially home) networks:

1. Aggregation: is WiFi too slow for your 4k movie streaming? Add a powerline connection and combine them.
2. Failover: alternative route is seamlessly selected when a link is down or congested.

On top of that nVoy finally adds a simple, yet secure push-button configuration. Just push a button on one nVoy enabled device and then on a second device within a certain time frame, causing the devices to join the same network over a secured link. Alternatively there is an out-of-band configuratuon option using NFC. Touch a device’s NFC interface with a second NFC device enabled to carry the 1905.1 network key, forwarding the key on to the other device.

You may not be immediately aware of the importance of the IEEE 1905.1 standard, but it seems to be the most important home networking and IoT event that happened in 2013 and the most important underlying development in 2014, leading to proliferation of connected / smart IoT appliances at home. Certainly something we have been waiting for and something to put on a watch-list.