NeTS:Small:Collaborative Research:Holistic Transparent Performance Assurance within the Crowded Spectrum

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Cheap commercial off-the-shelf wireless devices are being increasingly deployed for performance-sensitive applications such as patient monitoring with body sensors and home networking for multimedia and gaming. However, wireless communications may interfere with each other when they use the same or adjacent radio frequencies. This becomes a growing issue as the public 2.4GHz spectrum is being populated by a variety of devices, including 802.11b/g routers, ZigBee sensors, Bluetooth headsets, and cordless phones. Existing interference mitigation schemes are tightly tied with the physical/MAC layers of particular platforms, and hence often cannot co-exist in the same network without sacrificing the system performance. This project develops a Holistic Transparent Performance Assurance (HTPA) framework to support performance-sensitive applications in the crowded spectrum. HTPA consists of 1) a spectrum profiler that models the spectrum usage and dynamic external, intra- and inter-platform interferences in heterogeneous wireless environments; 2) a virtualized medium access control layer that provides unified interfaces for transparently representing, monitoring, and scheduling the underlying radio resources; and 3) a stream and system performance assurance component that schedules radio resources for each individual data stream, and harnesses network interference based on the system knowledge, MAC abstractions, and dynamic spectrum models. HTPA enables network designers to systematically understand and mitigate the impact of complex interference that exist between heterogeneous wireless devices, and provides reference models for the standardization of future commercial wireless platforms operating in unlicensed spectrums.