Frequency-aware rate adaptation and MAC protocols

There has been burgeoning interest in wireless technologies that can use wider frequency spectrum. Technology advances, such as 802.11n and ultra-wideband (UWB), are pushing toward wider frequency bands. The analog-to-digital TV transition has made 100250 MHz of digital whitespace bandwidth available for unlicensed access. Also, recent work on WiFi networks has advocated discarding the notion of channelization and allowing all nodes to access the wide 802.11 spectrum in order to improve load balancing. This shift towards wider bands presents an opportunity to exploit frequency diversity. Specifically, frequencies that are far from each other in the spectrum have significantly different SNRs, and good frequencies differ across sender-receiver pairs. This paper presents FARA, a combined frequency-aware rate adaptation and MAC protocol. FARA makes three departures from conventional wireless network design: First, it presents a scheme to robustly compute per-frequency SNRs using normal ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Hariharan Rahul, Farinaz Edalat, Dina Katabi, Charles Sodini
• Keywords: Communications, MAC Protocol, MOBICOM 2009, Wider Frequency, Wider Frequency Spectrum