Mobicom. Day 1

Mobicom'11 is being held in the (always interesting) city of Las Vegas. In this first day, the talks were mainly about wireless technologies and different techniques to avoid congestions were proposed.

Plenary Session
Keynote Speaker: Rajit Gadh (Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA)

Prof. Gadh talked about UCLA project “SmartGrid”, a topic which is gaining momentum in California.  This project is motivated by the fact that electricity comes from a grid that spread across a whole country and we are still using technology that has been deployed 100 years ago. The grid is rigid, fixed and large. In fact, Rajit Gadh thinks that there is a clear parallelism between data networks and power networks. Based on that observation, they aim to create a Smart Grid infrastructure with the following characteristics: self healing, active participation of consumers, capabilities to accommodate all the energy sources and storage options, eco-friendly, etc.. More information can be found in the project website.

SESSION 1. Enterprise Wireless
FLUID: Improving Throughputs in Entreprise Wireless LANs through Flexible Channelization, Shravan Rayanchu (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA); Vivek Shrivastava (Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto); Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA); and Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft, USA)

One of the problems in current 802.11 technologies is that channels width is fixed. However, many advantages arise by replacing fixed witch channels with flexible width ones. The goal of this paper is to build a model that can capture flexible channel conflicts, and then use this model to improve the overall throughput in a WLAN.

One of the problems in wireless channels is that depending on the interference, there are different approaches to avoid conflicts.  Nevertheless, the interference depends on the configuration of the channel. As an example, narrowing the width helps to reduce interference but they also tried to better understand the impact of the power levels.

They showed that given a SNR, it is possible that nodes can predict the delivery ratio for an specific channel width. As a result, the receiver can compute the SNR and predict the Delivery ratio as a function of the SNR autonomously. Given that, the problem of channel assignment and scheduling becomes into a flexible channel assignment and scheduling problem.

SmartVNC: An Effective Remote Computing Solution for Smartphones, Cheng-Lin Tsao, Sandeep Kakumanu, and Raghupathy Sivakumar (Georgia Tech University, USA)

In our opinion, this paper was a great example of how to improve the user experience with certain applications. In this case, they are trying to improve the UX of mobile VNC. This kind of service was designed for desktops and laptops so they do not take into account the nature of smartphones. The goal is allowing users to access a remote PC (in this case Windows) from a smart phone (Android) in a friendly way. They evaluated the UX of 22 users (experienced users, students between 20-30 y.o.) and 9 applications running on VNC. They defined different metrics such as the opinion score (the higher the complexity lesser the mean opinion score) and task effort (number of operations required for a task such as mouse clicks , key storekes etc). Given that, they correlated both metrics for those users running apps in VNC and the results showed that when the task effor is high, the UX is poorer.

They proposed aggregating repetitive sequences of operations in user activity to remove redundancy without being harmless. One of the main problems was that application macros (like in excel) are not completely application agnostic but they are extensible whilst others such as raw macros (e.g. autohotkey) are completely opposite.

They enabled Smart macros. For that, they record events and build macros and they enabled a tailored interface with collapsive overlays on the remote computing client, grouping macros by app, automatic zooming, etc.  For the applications they tested with those 22 users, they had a task effort reduction from 100 to 3 whilst the time to perform a task is also highly reduced. In the subjective evaluation, all the users showed their satisfaction with the new VNC. The talk was completed with a video recorded demo of the system.

FERMI: A FEmtocell Resource Management System for Interference Mitigation in OFDMA Networks, Mustafa Yasir Arslan (University of California Riverside, USA); Jongwon Yoon (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA); Karthikeyan Sundaresan (NEC Laboratories America, USA); Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy (University of California Riverside, USA); Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA); Mustafa Arslan

Femtocells: are small cellular base stations that use cable backhaul and they can extend the network coverage. In this scenario, interferences can be a problem but this problem differs from the ones that can be found in the WiFi literature. OFDMA (WiMax, LTE) uses sub-channels at the PHY and multiple users are scheduled in the same frame whilst WiFi uses OFDM (sequential units of symbols transmitted at an specific freq in time). Moreover, OFDMA presents a synchronous MAC (there's no carrier sensing like in WiFi). As a consequence, WiFi solutions cannot be applied to femtocells as interference leads to throughput loss and there are many clients coexisting in the same frame.

As a consequence, the solution must take into account both the time domain and the frequency domain. FERMI gathers load and interference related information. It operates at a coarse granularity (in the order of minutes) but this is not a drawback as interference does not change a lot in this time scale. Moreover, a per-frame solution is not feasible as the interference patterns change on each retransmission but aggregate interference and load change only at coarse time scales.

The system evaluation was done on a WiMax testbed and also on simulations. In both cases, they obtained a 50% throughput gain over pure sub-channel isolation solutions. The core results can be applicable to LTE as well.

SESSION 2. Wireless Access
WiFi-Nano: Reclaiming WiFi Efficiency through 800ns Slots, Eugenio Magistretti (Rice University, USA); Krishna Kant Chintalapudi (Microsoft Research, India);Bozidar Radunovic (Microsoft Research, U.K.); and Ramachandran Ramjee (Microsoft Research, India)

Wifi data rates have increased but throughput performance didn't see similar level of growth. Throughput is much lower than data-rate because of a high frame overhead. There’s a 45% overhead at 54Mbps but this overhead dominates at high bandwidth, around 80% in 300Mbps. This gets worst when multiple-links come at play.

This observation motivated WiFi nano, a technology that allows doubling the throughput of WiFi networks. Slot overhead can be reduced by 10x. Their solution proposes using nano slots to reduce slot duration to 9 microsec (that’s the standard one in 802.11a/n and it’s almost the minimum achievable). In addition, they exploit speculative preambles as preamble detection and transmission occur in parallel. As soon as the back-off expires, a node transmits the preamble but while transmitting preamble, it continues to detect incoming preambles even with self-interference. Their empirical results show that slightly longer preambles improve the throughput up to a 100% and frame aggregation can increase those figures even more. In fact, frame aggregation increases the efficiency as it grows from 17% to more than almost 80%.

XPRESS: A Cross-Layer Backpressure Architecture for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks, Rafael Laufer (University of California at Los Angeles, USA); Theodoros Salonidis; Henrik Lundgren and Pascal Leguyadec (Technicolor, Corporate Research Lab, France)

Multihop networks operate below capacity due to poor coordination across layers, and among transmitting nodes.  They propose using backpressure scheduling and cross-layering optimisations. At each slot, it selects optimal link set for transmission.  In their opinion, there are different challenges in multihop networks:

1- Time slots.
2- Link sets (e.g. knowing non-interfereng links)
3- Protocol overhead
4- Computation overhead
5- Link Scheduling.
6- Hardware constraints (e.g. memory limitations in wireless cards)

With XPRESS, all those challenges are addressed. XPRESS has two main components the MC (mesh controller) and the MAP (Mesh access point). MCs receive flow queues, computes schedule and disseminates schedule. On the other hand, MAP executes schedules and processes queues. The key challenge is computing the optimal schedule per slot. but this task takes a lot of time.

The MAP nodes use a x-layer protocol stack to compute the schedules. Apps running on the node go into the kernel who classifies the flows and allocates them on its own queue who is followed by a congestion controller. Then, the pipeline has a flow queue followed by a packet scheduller who puts into the proper link queue each packet. Somehow this reminds me of the work on Active Networks as they are dynamically change the behaviour of the network, in this case on a mesh-scenario. The proposed scheme achieves 63% and 128% gains over 802.11 24 Mbps and auto-rate schemes, respectively. They also performed an scalability evaluation.

CRMA: Collision-Resistant Multiple Access, Tianji Li, Mi Kyung Han, Apurva Bhartia, Lili Qiu, Eric Rozner, and Ying Zhang (University of Texas at Austin, USA); Brad Zarikoff (Hamilton Institute, Ireland)

FDMA, TDMA, FTDMA, CSMA are the traditional MAC protocols to avoid collisions. These techniques incur significant overhead so they move from collision avoidance to collision resistance based on a new encoding/decoding to allow mutliple signal to be transmitted.

In CRMA, every transmitter views the OFDM physical layer as multi orthogonal but sharable channels, and randomly selects a subset of the channels for transmission. When multiple transmissions overlap on a channel, these signals will naturally add up in the wireless medium.

In this system, ACKs are sent as data frames. However there’s a problem with misaligned collisions which are handled with cyclic prefixes (CP) so they force the collided symbols to fall in the same FFT window. On the other hand, overlapping transmissions are limited using exponential back-off.

The evaluation was done on a testbed experiment with CRMA on top of a default OFDM implementation in USRP. They also used Qualnet simulations to evaluate the efficiency of the networks.