Executive Summary : | To provide widespread internet connectivity across the country to support the government’s various initiatives, Wi-Fi technology based on IEEE 802.11 standard has emerged as a low-cost, quick-to-deploy, and easy-to-maintain alternative. However, deployments of such Wi-Fi networks often suffer from reliability issues pertaining to low end-to-end throughput and large delay. The investigators hypothesize that such issues arise because of a lack of holistic view of the Wi-Fi channel, lack of advanced radio resource management (RRM) schemes to exploit ‘good channel’ transmission opportunities, and lack of widely available WLAN management frameworks to locate such transmission opportunities and deploy appropriate RRM schemes. Further, various low-cost W-Fi solutions suffer from the deployment of inefficient algorithms and technologies which are not rigorously tested and optimized for real-deployment scenarios due to the unavailability of open, reliable, and realistic testbeds. In this project, they adopt a four-pronged approach to address the abovementioned issues. The proposed approach consists of (a) using cloud-based data analytics for Wi-Fi channel analysis and building multi-scale spatio-temporal models of channel characteristics for efficient Wi-Fi network, (b) performance analysis of 802.11 WLANs, particularly in dense and heterogeneous deployment environments to design various RRM schemes, such as efficient and smart schedulers and power-control algorithms to make use of favorable operating conditions, (c) development of open WLAN management framework, supporting both legacy (802.11a/b/g/n/ac) as well as the upcoming 802.11ax standards, and (d) development of open WLAN testbed for rapid-prototyping in realistic operating environments. To the best of investigators’ knowledge, this is the first work to assume such a holistic approach to WLAN development, monitoring, operation, and analysis.
With this proposal, investigators plan to deliver:
a. Cloud-based data-analytics engine to analyse the Wi-Fi channel. As the tools and methods used for the development of such an engine are going to be general, the engine may find use in the analysis of a variety of other wireless channels
b. Advanced radio resource management algorithms to efficiently use favorable operating conditions obtained from a comprehensive view of the Wi-Fi channel
c. An Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) based open WLAN testbed to evaluate the performance of new WLAN algorithms and technologies in realistic yet controllable environments
d. An open and heterogeneous Wi-Fi management framework, supporting both legacy and the upcoming 802.11ax standards.
It will also expose APIs to enable R&D teams in the participating institutions to build RRM/SON/ML algorithms independent of the underlying hardware/software. It will also contribute to the R&D effort by providing insights into real-life deployments, best practices and new use cases/requirements |
Co-PI: | Dr Mukulika Maity, Assistant Professor, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, Dr Venkatesh Ramaiyan, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Prof. Joy Kuri, Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), Bengaluru |