Wireless Coexistence in Open Radio Spectrum: Curses and Blessings

The world is expected be replete with wireless Internet of Things such as smart appliances, vehicles, wearables, etc. However, due to the shared physical media, interference becomes a growing issue as wireless devices populate the public radio bands, such as 802.11 computers, ZigBee sensors, and Bluetooth devices.

First, my group is among the first to systematically study the issue of co-existence between Wi-Fi and ZigBee networks [MobiCom10, ICNP10, RTSS11, PerCom13, MobiSys13, Infocom14, Infocom15, TMC14]. We propose a novel approach that enables ZigBee links to achieve assured performance in the presence of heavy Wi-Fi interference. Second, we proposed a novel top-down cross-layer wireless design approach. While the traditional wisdom of cross-layer design is to exploit PHY/link layer information at upper-layers, our approach represents a paradigm shift in that it leverages signatures of upper-layer protocols to improve PHY and link layer performance, particularly in the presence of significant interference. By capturing traffic signatures such protocol-specific header structures and spatiotemporal correlation of application payload, a wireless receiver can predict some values of received bits even before they are decoded, and exploit them in decoding to optimize the performance of PHY and link layers. Our approach can be easily integrated with different wireless standards, such as 802.11p used for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network, as well as WiMAX and LTE used for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Third, my group is the first to demonstrate the significant benefits of exploiting cross-technology wireless interference. We developed new systems that utilize ZigBee radios to identify the existence of Wi-Fi networks through unique interference signatures generated by Wi-Fi beacons. These systems have been used for WiFi discovery on mobile devices and time synchronization in large ZigBee networks.

Funding

1. National Science Foundation, "CAREER: Design and Analysis of Performance-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks: A Fusion-Centric Approach", PI, $424,673, 2010-2016.
2. National Science Foundation, "NeTS: Holistic Transparent Performance Assurance in the Crowded Spectrum", PI, $200,000, 2009/9-2013/9.

People

Guoliang Xing (PI, Professor, CUHK)
Jun Huang (Ph.D 2011, currently Assistant Professor at Peking University, China)
Wahhab Al Bazrqaoe (Ph.D candidate, MSU)
Alireza Ameli (Ph.D candidate, MSU)

Awards & Recognitions

• Mark Weiser Best Paper Award Runner-up, “Negotiate Power and Performance in the Reality of RFID Systems”, the 8th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 2010.
• Best Paper Finalist, “Passive Interference Measurement in Wireless Sensor Networks”, The 18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), 2010.
• Best Paper Award, “Beyond Co-existence: Exploiting WiFi White Space for ZigBee Performance Assurance”, the 18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), 2010.