WLANs site shielding by means of trees and shrubbery

WLANs are exposed to interference by other WLANs, and to access attacks from hackers. The interference between WLANs is an emergent problem, as the number of networks sharing the same space grows. On the other hand, hackers could try to access the network via radio, out of the net-manager control. The proposal of this paper is the use of barriers constructed by trees or shrubbery, with two objectives. One of them is to increase the network radio shielding, which provides protection against interference. The second objective is to limit the WLAN coverage to reduce the possibility of external attacks. Two different vegetal species have been tested in a pair of geometrical configurations, at 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. Mean attenuations up to 6 dB at 2.4 GHz, and up to 15 dB at 5.8 GHz have been measured. This demonstrates the viability of the use of lines of trees or shrubbery to provide site shielding to WLAN servers.