Geo-fencing: Confining Wi-Fi Coverage to Physical Boundaries

We present a means of containing Wi-Fi coverage to physical boundaries that are meaningful to users. We call it geo-fencing. Our approach is based on directional antennas, and our motivation is to provide wireless access and privacy models that are a natural fit with user expectations. To evaluate geo-fencing, we use measurements from an indoor testbed of Wi-Fi nodes and APs with electronically-steerable directional antennas. We find that by combining directionality, power control and coding across multiple APs, we are able to successfully confine Wi-Fi coverage to clients located within target regions of varying shapes and sizes; we can select between nodes located as close as five feet from each other.