AutoMAC: rateless wireless concurrent medium access

  • Authors:

  • Aditya Gudipati;Stephanie Pereira;Sachin Katti

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Current wireless network design is built on the ethos of avoiding interference. In this paper we question this long-held design principle. We show that with appropriate design, successful concurrent transmissions can be enabled and exploited on both the uplink and downlink. We show that this counter-intuitive approach of encouraging interference can be exploited to increase network capacity significantly and simplify network design. We design and implement name, a novel MAC and PHY protocol that exploits recently proposed rateless coding techniques to provide such concurrency. We show via a prototype implementation and experimental evaluation that name can provide a 60% increase in network capacity on the uplink compared to traditional Wifi that does omniscient rate adaptation and a $35\%$ median throughput gain on the downlink PHY layer as compared to an omniscient scheme that picks the best conventional bitrate.