Executive Summary : | WiFi has become one of the critical components for last hop connectivity. It has gained added traction due to various initiatives by the Government of India, such as Digital India,
Smart City.
The density of WiFi is also increasing.
The experience of using WiFi in dense settings is very poor mainly due to these two reasons: (1) the clients
face frequent disconnections, and (2) the performance of the network is sub-optimal.
In this project, we propose two approaches for improving WiFi performance in
such scenarios: (1) for sending a small amount of information, enable communication over WiFi without establishing a WiFi association.
In dense WiFi settings, the clients face frequent disconnections, therefore maintaining a persistent WiFi association for a AP-client pair becomes difficult.
On the other hand, in some emergency scenarios like a disaster situation or in large public events like Kumbh-mela, it is very difficult to set up a communication infrastructure
for announcing any crucial information. Also, most battery constrained Internet-of-Things nodes communicate over WiFi.
The energy of such nodes gets wasted in maintaining a WiFi connection.
However, for any communication to happen in a WLAN, the clients must be associated with the AP.
In this project, we support communication between the wireless nodes and access points without any association.
Some of the management frames of WiFi are transmitted periodically with/without association e.g., beacons, probe requests.
We intend to stuff information into such management frames of WiFi to support two types of communication: (i) downlink, by stuffing information into the beacon
frames that are transmitted by the AP periodically, namely beacon stuffing,
and (ii) uplink, by stuffing information into the probe request frames that are transmitted by the client periodically, namely probe stuffing.
We will develop an end-to-end prototype of both.
We will conduct a detailed evaluation of these to understand its benefits, limitations, and the effects on other clients following default association based protocol.
(2) Next, we focus on schemes for improving the performance of WiFi.
In the last decade, the capacity/raw-bitrate of WiFi has increased manyfold, but the WiFi performance in dense scenarios is still poor.
IEEE 802.11 task group is coming up with a new WiFi standard IEEE 802.11ax, which is designed to improve the
efficiency of a WLAN, especially in dense deployment scenarios.
We will conduct a detailed analysis of
various enhancements proposed in the IEEE 802.11ax and will evaluate the performance benefits and limitations in real world use cases.
We will develop various algorithms and strategies such as packet scheduler, transmission power control, rate control etc. for an efficient operation of future WLAN.
We will evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes in simulations and in real settings. |