AirMagnet Secures U.S. Patent for Detecting Hidden WLAN Users

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Tim Higgins

AirMagnet today announced that the company has been issued U.S. Patent No. 7,130,289 for creating a method to expose hidden nodes in a wireless LAN (WLAN) environment. CTO Chia-Chee Kuan, as well as Chief Architect Miles Wu, and President and CEO Dean Au, developed the patented technology as a core component of wireless analysis to proactively identify and explain security and performance threats.

A hidden-node problem occurs when a wireless device, or node, cannot hear one or more of the other devices, causing the collision avoidance protocol to function improperly. Multiple devices attempt to transmit their data over the shared medium simultaneously and create signal interference with one another. By identifying hidden devices, the patented hidden-node detection technology helps network administrators minimize network downtime and lost productivity.

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