Most spectrum distribution proposals today develop their allocation algorithms that use conflict graphs to capture interference relationships. The use of conflict graphs, however, is often questioned by the wireless community because of two issues. First, building conflict graphs requires significant overhead and hence generally does not scale to outdoor networks, and second, the resulting conflict graphs do not capture accumulative interference.In this paper, we use large-scale measurement data as ground truth to understand just how severe these issues are in practice, and whether they can be overcome. We build "practical" conflict graphs using measurement-calibrated propagation models, which remove the need for exhaustive signal measurements by interpolating signal strengths using calibrated models. These propagation models are imperfect, and we study the impact of their errors by tracing the impact on multiple steps in the process, from calibrating propagation models to predicting signal strength and building conflict graphs. At each step, we analyze the introduction, propagation and final impact of errors, by comparing each intermediate result to its ground truth counterpart generated from measurements. Our work produces several findings. Calibrated propagation models generate location-dependent prediction errors, ultimately producing conservative conflict graphs. While these "estimated conflict graphs" lose some spectrum utilization, their conservative nature improves reliability by reducing the impact of accumulative interference. Finally, we propose a graph augmentation technique that addresses any remaining accumulative interference, the last missing piece in a practical spectrum distribution system using measurement-calibrated conflict graphs.

Modern data centers are massive, and support a range of distributed applications across potentially hundreds of server racks. As their utilization and bandwidth needs continue to grow, traditional methods of augmenting bandwidth have proven complex and costly in time and resources. Recent measurements show that data center traffic is often limited by congestion loss caused by short traffic bursts. Thus an attractive alternative to adding physical bandwidth is to augment wired links with wireless links in the 60 GHz band.We address two limitations with current 60 GHz wireless proposals. First, 60 GHz wireless links are limited by line-of-sight, and can be blocked by even small obstacles. Second, even beamforming links leak power, and potential interference will severely limit concurrent transmissions in dense data centers. We propose and evaluate a new wireless primitive for data centers, 3D beamforming, where 60 GHz signals bounce off data center ceilings, thus establishing indirect line-of-sight between any two racks in a data center. We build a small 3D beamforming testbed to demonstrate its ability to address both link blockage and link interference, thus improving link range and number of concurrent transmissions in the data center. In addition, we propose a simple link scheduler and use traffic simulations to show that these 3D links significantly expand wireless capacity compared to their 2D counterparts.