Gap Sense: Lightweight coordination of heterogeneous wireless devices

Abstract

Abstract-Coordination of co-located wireless devices is a fundamental function/requirement for reducing interference. However, different devices cannot directly coordinate with one another as they often use incompatible modulation schemes. Even for the same type (e.g., WiFi) of devices, their coordination is infeasible when neighboring transmitters adopt different spectrum widths. Such an incompatibility between heterogeneous devices may severely degrade the network performance. In this paper, we introduce Gap Sense (GSense), a novel mechanism that can coordinate heterogeneous devices without modifying their PHYlayer modulation schemes or spectrum widths. GSense prepends legacy packets with a customized preamble, which piggy-backs information to enhance inter-device coordination. The preamble leverages the quiet period between signal pulses to convey such information, and can be detected by neighboring nodes even when they have incompatible PHY layers. We have implemented and evaluated GSense on a software radio platform, demonstrating its significance and utility in three popular protocols. GSense is shown to deliver coordination information with close to 100% accuracy within practical SNR regions. It can also reduce the energy consumption by around 44%, and the collision rate by more than 88% in networks of heterogeneous transmitters and receivers.

Supporting real-time wireless traffic through a high-throughput side channel

“…The M-preamble is comprised of duplicated versions of complex Gold sequences (CGS), whose length implicitly conveys the address information. Gap Sense [30] allows interaction between mobile devices with heterogeneous types of wireless networks, by prepending legacy packets with a preamble consisting of multiple energy pulses with quiet periods in between. This quiet period conveys control messages, and can be detected by neighboring nodes with incompatible physical layers.…”

A Survey on Spectrum Utilization in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The core idea of this concept is that communication between wireless devices, which have various physical layout and work on different standard (e.g., IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.1, and IEEE 802.15.4), can be accomplished by energy packet sensing [53,54], received signal strength (RSS) measurement [55][56][57], and CTI identification [58][59][60].…”

“…With analysis of harvested energy profiles, Esense enables communication between Wi-Fi and ZigBee devices. The paper [54] also wants to leverage the capability of energy sensing to coordinate heterogeneous devices without modifying their PHY layer modulation schemes or spectrum widths. To achieve this design goal, authors present GSense, which prepends legacy packets with a customized preamble that contains multiple energy pulses.…”

Detection Performance of Packet Arrival under Downclocking for Mobile Edge Computing

“…So far, downclocking has received great attention [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Among the most relevant works, [2] is the first paper that brought downclocking to low-power WiFi networks and proposed the SRID algorithm, which was considered as one of the most classical amendments on power saving of 802.11 protocols [12,13].…”