Speaker: Xinyu Zhang, Xinyu Zhang, UW Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abstract: Wireless spectrum is limited, so packing more devices into limited spectrum is the key to improving network capacity. Yet the current infrastructure wireless networks are interference-limited. Their capacity does not scale with the density of infrastructure nodes (i.e., the access points, or APs). This lack of scalability clearly mismatches the wireless traffic demand that is growing with user density. In this talk, I will introduce a novel network architecture, NEMOx, that can scale wireless network capacity with AP density. NEMOx organizes a network into practical-size clusters, each containing multiple distributed APs (dAPs) that opportunistically synchronize and cooperate with each other. Inter-cluster interference is managed with a decentralized channel-access algorithm, which is designed to balance between the dAPs' cooperation gain and spatial reuse. Within each cluster, NEMOx optimizes the power budgeting among dAPs and the set of users to serve, ensuring fairness and effective cancellation of cross-talk interference. We have implemented and evaluated a prototype of NEMOx in a software radio testbed, demonstrating its throughput scalability and multiple folds of performance gain over current wireless LAN architecture.