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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]

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]

Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling sustainable low-power operation of Internet of Things devices. This is due to its ability to enable sensing and communication through backscattering ambient wireless signals (e.g., WiFi and TV sig-nals). But a great impediment to AmBC-enabled networks is the difficulty in decoding the backscat-ter signals because the ambient signals are usually modulated and meant for other legacy receivers rather than AmBC devices. Drawing from the ability of machine learning (ML) to enhance the performance of wireless communication systems, some ML-aided techniques have been developed to assist signal detection in AmBC. Hence, this article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject by describing the operation of the AmBC network, highlighting the major challenges to signal detection in AmBC, discussing and com-paring the performance of some existing ML-assisted solutions to AmBC signal detection, and highlighting some future research that could be carried out on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents the design, feasibility evaluation, and performance validation of ICMR, a novel cross layer protocol that can maximize concurrent transmissions and avoid data frame interference in wireless networks, achieving a higher throughput comparing with the 802.11 standard and other state-of-the-art protocols. Observations on the 802.11 standard reveal that nodes around both the transmitter and receiver of the ongoing link waste concurrent transmission opportunities, degrading the network throughput dramatically. A state-of-the-art protocol IRMA is proposed to improve the network throughput through exploiting concurrent transmissions at the transmitter side. In this paper, a new ICMR protocol focuses on the receiver side to further improve the network throughput, through exploiting discernible interference cancellation, a physical layer mechanism that can successfully detect data frames when collided by control frames. We analyze the concurrent transmission opportunities of one link from the transmitter's transmission opportunities and the receiver's reception opportunities, then formulate the opportunities and give theoretical analysis to indicate that ICMR will have a higher opportunity over other protocols. Feasibility of the discernible interference cancellation mechanism is demonstrated through experiment results based on USRP2, and the throughput improvement of ICMR comparing with the other protocols is confirmed through simulations based on ns-2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]