Integration of WiFi ToF Positioning System in the Open, Flexible and Adaptive WiSHFUL Architecture
We integrate a prototypeWiFi Time-of-Flight (ToF) ranging and positioning system in the WiSHFUL software platforms and hardware radios for experimental prototyping. Users have access to ToF measurements as well as computed positions through unified programming interfaces that make possible to investigate innovative positioning and networking solutions. TRUE pub
Location-Aware MAC Scheduling in Industrial-Like Environment
We consider an environment strongly affected by the presence of metallic objects, that can be considered representative of an indoor industrial environment with metal obstacles. This scenario is a very harsh environment where radio communication has notorious difficulties, as metallic objects create a strong blockage component and surfaces are highly reflective. In this environment, we investigate how to dynamically allocate MAC resources in time to static and mobile users based on context awareness extracted from a legacy WiFi positioning system. In order to address this problem, we integrate our WiFi ranging and positioning system in the WiSHFUL architecture and then define a hypothesis t…
Revealing transmit diversity mechanisms and their side-effects in commercial IEEE 802.11 cards
Service differentiation in WLAN has been traditionally faced at the MAC layer. However, some PHY layer parameters, such as the transmission power, the antenna, and the modulation/coding scheme, have a deep impact on network performance. Since the criterion for selecting these parameters is left to the vendor specific implementations, the performance spread of most experimental results about 802.11 WLAN could be affected by vendor proprietary schemes. The focus of this paper is an experimental analysis of the undisclosed antenna diversity mechanisms employed by some widely used cards (namely, the Atheros and Intel based cards), and a thorough understanding of the optimization goals which gui…
“Vendor-Affected” WLAN experimental results: A Pandora’s Box?
Experimental results are typically envisioned as the ultimate validation reference for any theoretical and/or simulation modelling assumptions. However, in the case of Wireless LANs, the situation is not nearly as straightforward as it might seem. In this paper, we discuss to what (large) extent measurement results may depend on proprietary undocumented algorithms implemented in the vendor-specific card/driver employed. Specifically, we focus on the experimental study of IEEE 802.11 b/g outdoor links based on the widely used Atheros/MADWiFi card/driver pair. We show that unexpected performance divergences do emerge in two classes of comparative experiments run on a same outdoor link: broadc…
Diagonal space time hadamard codes with erasure decoding algorithm
A major challenge in the area of space time (ST) codes is to find codes suitable for efficient decoding, thus overcoming the problem of many existing ST code designs which require maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding. A solution could be to apply single-input single-output (SISO) channel codes and theory over temporal channel fading to the multi-input single-output (MISO) code construction and classical suboptimum decoding methods. For these purposes, an ST code construction which allows the use of efficient decoding algorithms is described. We propose a concatenated code, where the inner code is the diagonal ST Hadamard (D-STH) code with Paley constructions and the outer code is an algebraic b…
An explanation for unexpected 802.11 outdoor link-level measurement results
This paper provides experimental evidence that "weird'/poor outdoor link-level performance measurements may be caused by driver/card-specific antenna diversity algorithms unexpectedly supported/activated at the WLAN transmitter side. We focus our analysis on the Atheros/MADWiFi card/driver case, and we observe that the transmit antenna diversity mechanisms remain by default enabled when the available antennas are not homogeneous in terms of gain or, even worse, when only a single antenna is connected. This may cause considerable performance impairments (large frame loss ratio), in conditions frequently encountered in outdoor link deployments. The negative impact of transmit antenna diversit…
Joint LMMSE equalizer for HSDPA in full-rate space time transmit diversity schemes
This contribution presents a joint linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) equalizer for full-rate space-time transmit diversity multi-code schemes based on W-CDMA, featuring two and four transmit antennas. Specifically, high-rate, high load systems are targeted, in order to analyze the high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) of 3GPP Release 6. We derive an equivalent transmission scheme to equalize the received sufficient statistic in a single stage. To reduce the effects of multipath and multiuser interference, and to provide spatial and frequency diversity at the receiver, an LMMSE equalizer is employed. Computer simulations confirm that the proposed schemes achieve robust performance…
Side Effects of Ambient Noise Immunity Techniques on Outdoor IEEE 802.11 Deployments
A very common conclusion of many experimental studies about IEEE 802.11 outdoor network deployments is that their poor performance results derive from the unfavorable interference and multi-path signals in which the WLAN-cards are required to operate. Goal of this paper is to show that this condition does not always hold, and unexpected and inaccurated PHY layer implementations can be a primary cause of packet losses. With the support of extensive measurement campaigns led in our campus, we provide the performance evidence that IEEE 802.11 outdoor performance impairments are strongly affected by proprietary interference mitigation techniques that adaptively adjust the WLAN-card receiver sen…