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Improving channel utilization is a well-known issue in wireless networks. In traditional point-to-point wireless communication, significant efforts had been made by the existing studies on enhancing the utilization of the channel access time. However, in the emerging wireless network using MU-MIMO, considering only the time domain in channel utilization is not sufficient. As multiple transmitters are allowed to transmit packets simultaneously to the same AP, allowing more antennas at AP would lead to higher channel utilization. Thus, the channel utilization in MU-MIMO should consider both time and spatial domains, i.e., the channel access time and the antenna usage, which have not been considered in the existing methods. In this paper, we point out that the fundamental problem is lacking of the antenna information of contention nodes in channel contention. To address this issue, we propose a new MAC-PHY architecture design, CUTS, to allow distributed nodes effectively contend for the channel and utilize the channel in both domains. Particularly, CUTS adopts interference nulling to attach the antenna information in channel contention. Meanwhile, techniques such as channel contention in frequency domain and ACK in frequency domain using self-jamming are adopted. Through the software defined radio-based real experiments and extensive simulations, we demonstrate the feasibility of our design and illustrate that CUTS provides better channel utilization with the gain over IEEE 802.11 reaching up to 470 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leveraging concurrent transmission is a promising way to improve throughput in wireless networks. Existing media access control (MAC) protocols like carrier sense multiple access always try to minimize the number of concurrent transmissions to avoid collision, although collisions at sender sides are harmless to the overall performance. The reason for such conservative strategy is that those protocols cannot obtain accurate channel status (who is transmitting and receiving) with low cost. They can only avoid potential collisions through rough channel status (idle or busy). To obtain additional information in a cost-efficient way, we propose a novel coding scheme, Attachment Coding, to allow control information to be “attached” on data packet. Nodes then transmit two kinds of signals simultaneously, without degrading the effective throughput of the original data traffic. Based on Attachment Coding, we propose an Attached-RTS MAC (AR-MAC) to exploit exposed terminals for concurrent transmissions. The attached control information provides accurate channel status for nodes in real time. Therefore, nodes can identify exposed terminals and utilize them for concurrent transmission. We theoretically analyze the feasibility of Attachment Coding, and implement it on the GNU Radio testbed to further verify it. We also conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of Attached-RTS. The experimental results show that by leveraging Attachment Coding, AR-MAC achieves up to 180 percent in dense deployed ad hoc networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indoor positioning systems have received increasing attention for supporting location-based services in indoor environments. WiFi-based indoor localization has been attractive due to its open access and low cost properties. However, the distance estimation based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is easily affected by the temporal and spatial variance due to the multipath effect, which contributes to most of the estimation errors in current systems. In this work, we analyze this effect across the physical layer and account for the undesirable RSSI readings being reported. We explore the frequency diversity of the subcarriers in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems and propose a novel approach called FILA, which leverages the channel state information (CSI) to build a propagation model and a fingerprinting system at the receiver. We implement the FILA system on commercial 802.11 NICs, and then evaluate its performance in different typical indoor scenarios. The experimental results show that the accuracy and latency of distance calculation can be significantly enhanced by using CSI. Moreover, FILA can significantly improve the localization accuracy compared with the corresponding RSSI approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveillance is a critical problem for harbor protection, border control or the security of commercial facilities. The effective protection of vast near-coast sea surfaces and busy harbor areas from intrusions of unauthorized marine vessels, such as pirates smugglers or, illegal fishermen is particularly challenging. In this paper, we present an innovative solution for ship intrusion detection. Equipped with three-axis accelerometer sensors, we deploy an experimental Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) on the sea's surface to detect ships. Using signal processing techniques and cooperative signal processing, we can detect any passing ships by distinguishing the ship-generated waves from the ocean waves. We design a three-tier intrusion detection system with which we propose to exploit spatial and temporal correlations of an intrusion to increase detection reliability. We conduct evaluations with real data collected in our initial experiments, and provide quantitative analysis of the detection system, such as the successful detection ratio, detection latency, and an estimation of an intruding vessel's velocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RFID has been gaining popularity due to its variety of applications, such as inventory control and localization. One important issue in RFID system is tag identification. In RFID systems, the tag randomly selects a slot to send a Random Number (RN) packet to contend for identification. Collision happens when multiple tags select the same slot, which makes the RN packet undecodable and thus reduces the channel utilization. In this paper, we redesign the RN pattern to make the collided RNs decodable. By leveraging the collision slots, the system performance can be dramatically enhanced. This novel scheme is called DDC, which is able to directly decode the collisions without exact knowledge of collided RNs. In the DDC scheme, we modify the RN generator in RFID tag and add a collision decoding scheme for RFID reader. We implement DDC in GNU Radio and USRP2 based testbed to verify its feasibility. Both theoretical analysis and testbed experiment show that DDC achieves 40 percent tag read rate gain compared with traditional RFID protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To accommodate the soaring mobile broadband traffic, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. sets out to retrieve under-utilized spectrum (e.g., TV Whitespace) and lay the groundwork for spectrum redistribution. Auction is an efficient way to allocate resources to those who value them the most. The large pool of spectrums to be released, especially the ones in TV Whitespace, consist of wide-range frequencies. Apart from spatial reuse, spectrum heterogeneity imposes new challenges for spectrum auction design: 1) Wireless service providers with different targeted cell coverages have different spectrum frequency preferences; 2) interference relationship is frequency-dependent due to frequency-selective signal fading. Unfortunately, existing spectrum auction mechanisms either assume spectrum valuation is homogeneous or use homogeneous interference graph to group buyers who can reuse the same spectrum. In this paper, we propose TAMES, an auction framework for heterogeneous spectrum transaction. We consider a multi-seller-multi-buyer double auction, in which every buyer submits a bid, consisting of the spectrum demand and a bidding profile of prices for spectrums contributed by all sellers. A novel buyer grouping approach is proposed to tackle the problem of heterogeneous interference graph. TAMES is proved to be truthful as well as individually rational. The simulation results show that TAMES significantly improves spectrum utilization, sellers' revenue and buyers' utility by making smart use of spectrum heterogeneity, while keeping low running time comparable with existing auction mechanisms. Moreover, via simulation, we show how to help buyers obtain continuous spectrums which further improves buyers' satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radio frequency (RF) based technologies play an important role in indoor localization, since Radio Signal Strength (RSS) can be easily measured by various wireless devices without additional cost. Among these, radio map based technologies (also referred as fingerprinting technologies) are attractive due to high accuracy and easy deployment. However, these technologies have not been extensively applied on real environment for two fatal limitations. First, it is hard to localize multiple objects. When the number of target objects is unknown, constructing a radio map of multiple objects is almost impossible. Second, environment changes will generate different multipath signals and severely disturb the RSS measurement, making laborious retraining inevitable. Motivated by these, in this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Line-of-sight radio map matching, which only reserves the LOS signal among nodes. It leverages frequency diversity to eliminate the multipath behavior, making RSS more reliable than before. We implement our system MODLoc based on TelosB sensor nodes and commercial 802.11 NICs with Channel State Information (CSI) as well. Through extensive experiments, it shows that the accuracy does not decrease when localizing multiple targets in a dynamic environment. Our work outperforms the traditional methods by about 60 percent. More importantly, no calibration is required in such environment. Furthermore, our approach presents attractive flexibility, making it more appropriate for general RF-based localization studies than just the radio map based localization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RFID tag identification is a crucial problem in UHF RFID systems. Traditional tag identification algorithms can be classified into two categories, ALOHA-based and tree-based. Both of them are inefficient due to the incidental high coordination cost. In this paper, we bring CSMA into UHF RFID systems to enhance tag read rate by reducing coordination cost. However, it is not straightforward due to the simple hardware design of passive RFID tags, which is unable to sense the transmissions or collisions of other tags. To tackle this challenge, we propose receiver-based CSMA (RCSMA) in this paper. In RCSMA, the reader notifies the tags channel condition. According to different sensing results of reader's notifications, the tags take corresponding actions, e.g., random back off. RCSMA does not require special RFID tag hardware design. An absorbing Markov chain model is presented to analyze the performance of RCSMA and shown to be consistent with the simulation results. Compared with optimized ALOHA-based algorithms and optimized tree-based algorithms, RCSMA can enhance the tag read rate by 30-70 percent under different reader and tag data rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]