This paper presents ZigZag, an 802.11 receiver design that combats hidden terminals. ZigZag's core contribution is a new form of interference cancellation that exploits asynchrony across successive collisions. Specifically, 802.11 retransmissions, in the case of hidden terminals, cause successive collisions. These collisions have different interference-free stretches at their start, which ZigZag exploits to bootstrap its decoding.ZigZag makes no changes to the 802.11 MAC and introduces no overhead when there are no collisions. But, when senders collide, ZigZag attains the same throughput as if the colliding packets were a priori scheduled in separate time slots. We build a prototype of ZigZag in GNU Radio. In a testbed of 14 USRP nodes, ZigZag reduces the average packet loss rate at hidden terminals from 72.6% to about 0.7%.

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Zigzag decoding: combating hidden terminals in wireless networks

Cognitive radio (CR) has emerged as a promising technology to exploit the unused portions of spectrum in an opportunistic manner. The fixed spectrum allocation of governmental agencies results in unused portions of spectrum, which are called "spectrum holes" or "white spaces". CR technology overcomes this issue, allowing devices to sense the spectrum for unused portions and use the most suitable ones, according to some pre-defined criteria. Spectrum assignment is a key mechanism that limits the interference between CR devices and licensed users, enabling a more efficient usage of the wireless spectrum. Interference is a key factor that limits the performance in wireless networks. The scope of this work is to give an overview of the problem of spectrum assignment in cognitive radio networks, presenting the state-of-the-art proposals that have appeared in the literature, analyzing the criteria for selecting the most suitable portion of the spectrum and showing the most common approaches and techniques used to solve the spectrum assignment problem. Finally, an analysis of the techniques and approaches is presented, discussing also the open issues for future research in this area.

Spectrum Assignment in Cognitive Radio Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

The performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is affected by the lossy communication medium, application diversity, dense deployment, limited processing power and storage capacity, frequent topology change. All these limitations provide significant and unique design challenges to data transport control in wireless sensor networks. An effective transport protocol should consider reliable message delivery, energy-efficiency, quality of service and congestion control. The latter is vital for achieving a high throughput and a long network lifetime. Despite the huge number of protocols proposed in the literature, congestion control in WSN remains challenging. A review and taxonomy of the state-of-the-art protocols from the literature up to 2013 is provided in this paper. First, depending on the control policy, the protocols are divided into resource control vs. traffic control. Traffic control protocols are either reactive or preventive (avoiding). Reactive solutions are classified following the reaction scale, while preventive solutions are split up into buffer limitation vs. interference control. Resource control protocols are classified according to the type of resource to be tuned.

Congestion Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Partial packet recovery protocols attempt to repair corrupted packets instead of retransmitting them in their entirety. Recent approaches have used physical layer confidence estimates or additional error detection codes embedded in each transmission to identify corrupt bits, or have applied forward error correction to repair without such explicit knowledge. In contrast to these approaches, our goal is a practical design that simultaneously: (a) requires no extra bits in correct packets, (b) reduces recovery latency, except in rare instances, (c) remains compatible with existing 802.11 devices by obeying timing and backoff standards, and (d) can be incrementally deployed on widely available access points and wireless cards.In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate Maranello, a novel partial packet recovery mechanism for 802.11. In Maranello, the receiver computes checksums over blocks in corrupt packets and bundles these checksums into a negative acknowledgment sent when the sender expects to receive an acknowledgment. The sender then retransmits only those blocks for which the checksum is incorrect, and repeats this partial retransmission until it receives an acknowledgment. Successful transmissions are not burdened by additional bits and the receiver needs not infer which bits were corrupted. We implemented Maranello using OpenFWWF (open source firmware for Broadcom wireless cards) and deployed it in a small testbed. We compare Maranello to alternative recovery protocols using a trace-driven simulation and to 802.11 using a live implementation under various channel conditions. To our knowledge, Maranello is the first partial packet recovery design to be implemented in commonly available firmware.

/pdf/maranello-practical-partial-packet-recovery-for-802-11-288gvzpw88.pdf

Maranello: practical partial packet recovery for 802.11

Physical layer techniques have come a long way and can achieve very close to Shannon capacity for point-to-pint links. It is apparent that, to further improve network capacity significantly, we have to resort to concurrent transmissions. Many concurrent transmission techniques (e.g., zero forcing, interference alignment and distributed MIMO) are proposed in which multiple senders jointly encode signals to multiple receivers so that interference is aligned and each receiver is able to decode its desired information. In this paper, we investigate the constraints and challenges of using interference alignment. Our main contribution is conducting the first systematic investigation on the key issue of identifying opportunities for interference alignment. We identify diverse, novel scenarios for using interference alignment. We show that identifying opportunities for interference alignment in the general case is computational challenging. However, we also present a promising, distributed algorithm for identifying a wide range of opportunities for interference alignment using a unifying framework based on the degree of freedom. Our second contribution is evaluating key practical implementation issues.

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A General Algorithm for Interference Alignment and Cancellation in Wireless Networks

We highlight two fundamental problems that degrade the throughput of wireless mesh networks today. First, severe performance degradation can occur when sources send more traffic than what the network can support. The degradation can be sharp even in a simple setting of a single flow that traverses a network of two links. Second, current routing protocols fail to identify high throughput routing paths even when they exist. The underlying culprit in both cases is interference that is fundamental to wireless networks. As a first step towards a solution, we develop a novel approach to systematically account for and control interference in the network. Our approach uses (an approximation of) a formal model of interference to estimate the maximum rate at which flows can safely send traffic without overloading the network. Simulation and testbed experiments show that it can improve network throughput by as much as 50-100% in some configurations.

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Effects of Interference on Wireless Mesh Networks: Pathologies and a Preliminary Solution.

With the phenomenal growth of wireless networks and applications, it is increasingly important to deliver content efficiently and reliably over wireless links. However, wireless performance is still far from satisfactory due to limited wireless spectrum, inherent lossy wireless medium, and imperfect packet scheduling. While significant research has been done to improve wireless performance, much of the existing work focuses on individual design space. We take a holistic approach to optimizing wireless performance and resilience. We propose Fast Resilient Jumbo frames (FRJ), which exploit the synergy between three important design spaces: (i) frame size selection, (ii) partial packet recovery, and (iii) rate adaptation. While these design spaces are seemingly unrelated, we show that there are strong interactions between them and effectively leveraging these techniques can provide increased robustness and performance benefits in wireless LANs. FRJ uses jumbo frames to boost network throughput under good channel conditions and uses partial packet recovery to efficiently recover packet losses under bad channel conditions. FRJ also utilizes partial recovery aware rate adaptation to maximize throughput under partial recovery. Using real implementation and testbed experiments, we show that FRJ out-performs existing approaches in a wide range of scenarios.

/pdf/fast-resilient-jumbo-frames-in-wireless-lans-496hxzy7dj.pdf

Gaurav Deshpande

Papers

Effects of Interference on Wireless Mesh Networks: Pathologies and a Preliminary Solution.

Fast Resilient Jumbo frames in wireless LANs