Effect of Hidden Terminals on the Performance of IEEE 802.11 MAC Protocol
LCN '98 Proceedings of the 23rd Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks
Jigsaw: solving the puzzle of enterprise 802.11 analysis
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Using emulation to understand and improve wireless networks and applications
NSDI'05 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2
A case for adapting channel width in wireless networks
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication
Cross-layer wireless bit rate adaptation
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Fine-grained channel access in wireless LAN
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
Side channel: bits over interference
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
WiFi-Nano: reclaiming WiFi efficiency through 800 ns slots
MobiCom '11 Proceedings of the 17th 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
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
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Unlike their cellular counterparts, Wi-Fi networks do not have the luxury of a dedicated control plane that is decoupled from the data plane. Consequently, Wi-Fi struggles to provide many of the capabilities that are taken for granted in cellular networks, including efficient and fair resource allocation, QoS and handoffs. The reason for the lack of a control plane with designated spectrum is that it would impose significant overhead. This is at odds with Wi-Fi's goal of providing a simple, plug-and-play network. In this paper we present Flashback, a novel technique that provides a decoupled low overhead control plane for wireless networks that retains the simplicity of Wi-Fi's distributed asynchronous operation. Flashback allows nodes to reliably send short control messages concurrently with data transmissions, while ensuring that data packets are decoded correctly without harming throughput. We utilize Flashback's novel messaging capability to design, implement and experimentally evaluate a reliable control plane for Wi-Fi with rates from 175Kbps to 400Kbps depending on the environment. Moreover, to demonstrate its broad applicability, we design and implement a novel resource allocation mechanism that utilizes Flashback to provide efficient, QoS-aware and fair medium access, while eliminating control overheads including data plane contention, RTS/CTS and random back offs.