This week, we worked on identifying the critical components — hardware, software, and theoretical — that we will need in order to move forward with our project. We also discussed the architecture that we will use for beamforming wifi signals, such as the hardware components and their connection to and sampling of the array sensor elements.
The greatest risk that we face going forward are a lack of compatibility between our sensors that the signals we hope to capture. Wifi signals are transmitted at a relatively high frequency, so we need hardware that can sample it at the nyquist rate; this is not feasible using some boards, so we need to be careful which ones we choose. We mitigating this risk by thoroughly researching our hardware before we finalize anything.
We have only started design of our architecture this week, as per our schedule, so there have been no significant architectural changes since last week; our particular project demands some quite specific hardware, and so we are taking our time in planning out our system. Once we have our hardware, the design of our system will adhere closely to existing beamforming architectures, since any deviation from those will greatly complicate the underlying theoretical calculations and will more than likely yield sub-optimal results.