Connecting to Multiple 802.

11 Networks from
One WiFi Card Simultaneously
Using a single WiFi card to connect to multiple networks at the same time opens the personal
computer to new applications.

ost laptops and many desktop PCs

include a provision for wireless
connectivity (commonly called WiFi).
However, computers rarely have a provision
for more than one WiFi connection at a time,
because each connection must be served by
its own card. Some laptops allow for two
WiFi cards, but even that may be problematic
because of the physical size and shape of the
cards, and because of their need for power.
This soware solution virtualizes multiple
WiFi cards within the same computer. That
is, it creates two or more soware WiFi cards
in computer memory so that multiple WiFi
connections can take place essentially at the
same time. This means that the same computer
simultaneously can be connected to multiple
access points, to dierent WiFi networks,
to multiple nodes in an ad hoc network,
or to multiple WiFi channels on the same
network. (Or possibly all of these at the same
time.) The expanded functionality opens up
new applications that previously have been
unaddressable by computers equipped with
only a single WiFi connection.

How it works
Virtual WiFi is a virtualization architecture
for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards. It abstracts
a single WLAN card to appear as multiple
virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can
then congure each virtual card to connect
to a dierent wireless network. Therefore,
Virtual WiFi allows a user to simultaneously
connect his machine to multiple wireless
networks using just one WLAN card. This
new functionality introduced by Virtual WiFi
enables many new applications, which were
not possible earlier using a single WLAN card.
For example,

With Virtual WiFi, you can connect to a

guests machine or play games over an ad
hoc network, while surng the web via an
infrastructure network.

You can use Virtual WiFi to connect your

ad hoc network, which may contain many
nodes, to the Internet using only one node.

Virtual WiFi can help make your home

infrastructure network elastic by extending
its access to nodes that are out of range of
your home WiFi Access Point.

In more recent work, we have explored two

more applications of Virtual WiFi. The rst
application, which is a very useful tool for
fault diagnosis and recovery in infrastructure
wireless networks, is called Client Conduit.
Client Conduit is a tool that provides a thin
pipe of communication between disconnected
clients and back-end servers that perform
wireless diagnosis and recovery. The thin pipe
is achieved by running Virtual WiFi on the
connected clients. These clients dynamically
connect to disconnected clients over an ad hoc
network, and send messages from them to the
back-end servers.

The second application of Virtual WiFi that

increases the capacity of wireless ad hoc
networks using orthogonal channels is called
Sloed Seeded Channel Hopping (SSCH).
SSCH uses Virtual WiFi to virtualize a wireless
card with as many instances as the number
of orthogonal channels. It then connects each
virtual wireless card on a dierent orthogonal
channel.
We have implemented Virtual WiFi over
Windows XP. The current version is a
prototype implementation of Virtual WiFi, and
we are in the process of making our soware
more robust to include more features.

Interested in this technology? Ask

for an introduction to the technology
provider.
Contact: yet2.com Introduction
Manager, +1-781-972-0600 or email
introductions@yet2.com

Read more about this technology on the yet2.com

marketplace.
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tow0038576.pdf
yet2.com Inc., 175 Highland Avenue., Needham, MA 02494 USA | +1-781-972-0600

2 July 2006

Copyright 2006 yet2.com Inc.