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Bringing cross-layer MIMO to today's wireless LANs

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Recent years have seen major innovations in cross-layer wireless designs. Despite demonstrating significant throughput gains, hardly any of these technologies have made it into real networks. Deploying cross-layer innovations requires adoption from Wi-Fi chip manufacturers. Yet, manufacturers hesitate to undertake major investments without a better understanding of how these designs interact with real networks and applications.
This paper presents the first step towards breaking this stalemate, by enabling the adoption of cross-layer designs in today's networks with commodity Wi-Fi cards and actual applications. We present OpenRF, a cross-layer architecture for managing MIMO signal processing. OpenRF enables access points on the same channel to cancel their interference at each other's clients, while beamforming their signal to their own clients. OpenRF is self-configuring, so that network administrators need not understand MIMO or physical layer techniques.
We patch the iwlwifi driver to support OpenRF on off-the-shelf Intel cards. We deploy OpenRF on a 20-node network, showing how it manages the complex interaction of cross-layer design with a real network stack, TCP, bursty traffic, and real applications. Our results demonstrate an average gain of 1.6x for TCP traffic and a significant reduction in response time for real-time applications, like remote desktop.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
    ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 43, Issue 4
    October 2013
    595 pages
    ISSN:0146-4833
    DOI:10.1145/2534169
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
      August 2013
      580 pages
      ISBN:9781450320566
      DOI:10.1145/2486001
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 August 2013
    Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 43, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. cross-layer
    2. mimo
    3. sdn
    4. wireless

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    • (2023)On DoF Conservation in MIMO Interference Cancellation Based on Signal Strength in the EigenspaceIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2021.312644922:5(2862-2877)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
    • (2022)Cross Technology Distributed MIMO for Low Power IoTIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.302921821:5(1609-1624)Online publication date: 1-May-2022
    • (2022)EthanolComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2019.10.010149:C(176-188)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2022
    • (2021)Simultaneous Bi-Directional Communications and Data Forwarding Using a Single ZigBee Data StreamIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2021.305433929:2(821-833)Online publication date: Apr-2021
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