Fine-grained Channel Access in Wireless

LAN

SIGCOMM 2010

Kun Tan, Ji Fang, Yuanyang Zhang,Shouyuan Chen,

Lixin Shi, Jiansong Zhang, Yongguang Zhang
 Trends in 802.11 WLANs
• PHY data rate increases
– 802.11n up to 600Mbps
– 802.11ac/ad up to >1Gbps

• Data throughput efficiency degrades with PHY data rate

2
 Reasons for Low Throughput Efficiency
• Contention resolution overhead due to CSMA
• Coarse-grained channel allocation
– Whole channel allocated to a single station

3
 Possible solutions

• Reduce overhead
– Infeasible, physical laws/technology

• Increase useful channel time – frame aggregation

– OK, used in 802.11n but
– Practical limitations: 80% efficiency at 300Mbps requires
frame size of 23KB!

4
 An Alternative Approach
Fine-Grained channel Access
• Divide channel into smaller subchannels

• Multiple users contend for and use subchannels

simultaneously
– Based on traffic demands

• Amortize MAC coordination, increase channel

efficiency
5
 Challenges
• Need to avoid interference between neighbor
subchannels

• Traditional approach: guard bands

– High overhead

• OFDM – Orthogonal Frequency Division

Multiplexing
– “Eliminates” need for guard bands
– Requires tight synchronization (100s of nsec)
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 OFDM – High Level Overview
• Divides spectrum into many
small, partially overlapping
subcarriers
• Subcarrier frequencies
“orthogonal” to each other
• OFDM system with FFT size
N
– N subcarriers, each with
bandwidth B/N

7
 OFDM as multi-access technology
• Different stations assigned different subcarriers in the
same channel
– WiMAX, LTE
• Symbol timing alignment is critical

• Requires tight synch with cellular BS

– Use of guard times, CP (cyclic prefic)

– 802.11: CP-to-symbol length ratio 1:4 (0.8μs to 3.2μs)

8
 OFDM-based Channel Access in WLANs
• Challenge 1: Coordinate random access among
multiple stations
– Cannot use cellular-type synchronization
– Need a new OFDM architecure for distributed
coordination

• Challenge 2: Longer symbol length to maintain

1:4 CP-to-symbol length ratio
– Makes backoff mechanism inefficient
– Need new MAC contention mechanism, new backoff
scheme
9
 Paper Contributions
• Design and implementation of FICA
– Cross-layer architecture based on OFDM
– Enables fine-grained subchannel random access in
WLANs

• Two key techniques

– New PHY architecture based on OFDM
– Novel frequency domain contention method

10
 FICA Overview
• Uplink transmission

• Downlink transmission similar

11
 Symbol Time Misalignement
• Using carrier sensing

• Using reference broadcast

12
PHY Architecture
• Each 802.11 channel (20Mhz)
divided into 1.33Mhz
subchannels
– 14 + guardband
• Each subchannel divided into
17 subcarriers
– 16 + pilot
• Data is transmitted over all 16
subcarriers

13
 Frequency Domain Contention
• Allocate K subcarriers per subchannel
– Contention band

• Each node contending for a subchannel picks

randomly a subcarrier and sends a ‘1’ in M-RTS

• AP arbitrates contention and sends winning

subcarriers in M-CTS

14
 Issues in Frequency Domain
Contention
• What if 2 nodes choose the same subcarrier?
– Collision
– No transmission

• How large should K be?

– K=16 (initial backoff value in 802.11)

• Who is returning M-CTS?

– Only potential receivers
– Allocate 40 subcarriers, hash receiver’s ID into 0..39, set
appropriate subcarrier

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M-RTS, M-CTS

16
 Frequency Domain Backoff
• How many subchannels can a node contend for?
– n=min(Cmax, lqueue)

17
 Downlink Transmission
• AP can transmit simultaneously to many clients
– Different subchannels per client, has to contend for each
subchannel

• Two-way traffic
– FICA uses no backoff, AP and station can send M-RTS
simultaneously
• Solution: use different DIFS to prioritize transmissions
– Fixed DIFS to all stations, 2 DIFS to AP
– If AP uses short DIFS, use long DIFS next time
– If AP receives M-RTS, use short DIFS next time
– Fair interleaving of uplink-downlink, not among all stations!

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 Multiple Domains – Hidden Terminals
• Hidden terminals
– Collisions may cause M-RTS/M-CTS loss
– Random backoff after M-CTS loss

• Multiple domains
– Nodes may receive inconsistent M-CTS from different nodes
– Node only allowed to transmit if wins contention in all
domains it participates.

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 Evaluation
• Simulation

• Implementation

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 Simulation Setup
• Event-based simulator
• Only uplink traffic
• Packet loss only due to collisions
• Compare against 802.11n
– No aggregation
– Full aggregation
– Mixed traffic

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Simulation Results
No Aggregation

22
 Simulation Results
Full Aggregation
• All nodes saturated, frame size 18KB!

23
Simulation Results
Mixed Traffic

24
 Implementation
• Sora platform [NSDI ‘09]
– Fully programmable software radio platform

• Implementation cannot run in real time

– Takes too long to transfer PHY frames from CPU to
RCB (Even though Sora is the fastest platform
available)
– Have to prestore all PHY frames in RCB

25
Evaluation – Time Misalignment
With Broadcasting With Carrier Sensing

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Reliability of PHY Signaling

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Demodulation Performance

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 Conclusion
• Trend in 802.11 WLANs
– Throughput efficiency decreases as data rate increases
• Fundamental reason
– Entire wide-band channel allocated to one node

• FICA
– Cross-layer design to enable fine-grained subchannel
random access
– New PHY arhitecture based on OFDM
– New frequency domain backoff scheme

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