A Wireless MAC Protocol Using Implicit Pipelining
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Understanding congestion in IEEE 802.11b wireless networks
IMC '05 Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet Measurement
Cross-layer wireless bit rate adaptation
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
SMACK: a SMart ACKnowledgment scheme for broadcast messages in wireless networks
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
CENTAUR: realizing the full potential of centralized wlans through a hybrid data path
Proceedings of the 15th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Fine-grained channel access in wireless LAN
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
Achieving single channel, full duplex wireless communication
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
No time to countdown: migrating backoff to the frequency domain
MobiCom '11 Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
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Conventional WiFi networks perform channel contention in time domain. This is known to be wasteful because the channel is forced to remain idle, while all contending nodes are backing off for multiple time slots. This paper proposes to break away from convention and recreate the backing off operation in the frequency domain. Our basic idea is to pretend that OFDM subcarriers are integer numbers, and thereby, view today's random backoff process as equivalent to transmitting on a randomly chosen subcarrier. By employing a second antenna to listen to all the subcarriers, each node can determine whether its chosen integer (or subcarrier) is the smallest among all others. In fact, each node can even determine the rank of its chosen integer, enabling the feasibility of a TDMA-like schedule from every round of contention. We develop these ideas into a Time to Frequency (T2F) protocol and prototype it on a small testbed of 8 USRPs. Experiments confirm its feasibility, along with promising throughput gains of more than 35% at high bit rates. A fuller design and thorough evaluation of T2F is a topic of ongoing work.