A Survey on Multi-AP Coordination Approaches over Emerging WLANs: Future Directions and Open Challenges

Recent advancements in wireless local area network (WLAN) technology include IEEE 802.11be and 802.11ay, often known as Wi-Fi 7 and WiGig, respectively. The goal of these developments is to provide Extremely High Throughput (EHT) and low latency to meet the demands of future applications like as 8K videos, augmented and virtual reality, the Internet of Things, telesurgery, and other developing technologies. IEEE 802.11be includes new features such as 320 MHz bandwidth, multi-link operation, Multi-user Multi-Input Multi-Output, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access, and Multiple-Access Point (multi-AP) coordination (MAP-Co) to achieve EHT. With the increase in the number of overlapping APs and inter-AP interference, researchers have focused on studying MAP-Co approaches for coordinated transmission in IEEE 802.11be, making MAP-Co a key feature of future WLANs. Moreover, similar issues may arise in EHF bands WLAN, particularly for standards beyond IEEE 802.11ay. This has prompted researchers to investigate the implementation of MAP-Co over future 802.11ay WLANs. Thus, in this article, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art MAP-Co features and their shortcomings concerning emerging WLAN. Finally, we discuss several novel future directions and open challenges for MAP-Co.Comment: The reason for the replacement of the previous version of the paper is due to a change in the author's list. As a result, a new version has been created, which serves as the final draft version before acceptance. This updated version contains all the latest changes and improvements made to the pape

Algorithms and Experimentation for Future Wireless Networks: From Internet-of-Things to Full-Duplex

Future and next-generation wireless networks are driven by the rapidly growing wireless traffic stemming from diverse services and applications, such as the Internet-of-Things (IoT), virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, and smart intersections. Many of these applications require massive connectivity between IoT devices as well as wireless access links with ultra-high bandwidth (Gbps or above) and ultra-low latency (10ms or less). Therefore, realizing the vision of future wireless networks requires significant research efforts across all layers of the network stack. In this thesis, we use a cross-layer approach and focus on several critical components of future wireless networks including IoT systems and full-duplex (FD) wireless, and on experimentation with advanced wireless technologies in the NSF PAWR COSMOS testbed. First, we study tracking and monitoring applications in the IoT and focus on ultra-low-power energy harvesting networks. Based on realistic hardware characteristics, we design and optimize Panda, a centralized probabilistic protocol for maximizing the neighbor discovery rate between energy harvesting nodes under a power budget. Via testbed evaluation using commercial off-the-shelf energy harvesting nodes, we show that Panda outperforms existing protocols by up to 3x in terms of the neighbor discovery rate. We further explore this problem and consider a general throughput maximization problem among a set of heterogeneous energy-constrained ultra-low-power nodes. We analytically identify the theoretical fundamental limits of the rate at which data can be exchanged between these nodes, and design the distributed probabilistic protocol, EconCast, which approaches the maximum throughput in the limiting sense. Performance evaluations of EconCast using both simulations and real-world experiments show that it achieves up to an order of magnitude higher throughput than Panda and other known protocols. We then study FD wireless - simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency - a key technology that can significantly improve the data rate and reduce communication latency by employing self-interference cancellation (SIC). In particular, we focus on enabling FD on small-form-factor devices leveraging the technique of frequency-domain equalization (FDE). We design, model, and optimize the FDE-based RF canceller, which can achieve >50dB RF SIC across 20MHz bandwidth, and experimentally show that our prototyped FD radios can achieve a link-level throughput gain of 1.85-1.91x. We also focus on combining FD with phased arrays, employing optimized transmit and receive beamforming, where the spatial degrees of freedom in multi-antenna systems are repurposed to achieve wideband RF SIC. Moving up in the network stack, we study heterogeneous networks with half-duplex and FD users, and develop the novel Hybrid-Greedy Maximum Scheduling (H-GMS) algorithm, which achieves throughput optimality in a distributed manner. Analytical and simulation results show that H-GMS achieves 5-10x better delay performance and improved fairness compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, we described experimentation and measurements in the city-scale COSMOS testbed being deployed in West Harlem, New York City. COSMOS' key building blocks include software-defined radios, millimeter-wave radios, a programmable optical network, and edge cloud, and their convergence will enable researchers to remotely explore emerging technologies in a real world environment. We provide a brief overview of the testbed and focus on experimentation with advanced technologies, including the integrating of open-access FD radios in the testbed and a pilot study on converged optical-wireless x-haul networking for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). We also present an extensive 28GHz channel measurements in the testbed area, which is a representative dense urban canyon environment, and study the corresponding signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) coverage and achievable data rates. The results of this part helped drive and validate the design of the COSMOS testbed, and can inform further deployment and experimentation in the testbed. In this thesis, we make several theoretical and experimental contributions to ultra-low-power energy harvesting networks and the IoT, and FD wireless. We also contribute to the experimentation and measurements in the COSMOS advanced wireless testbed. We believe that these contributions are essential to connect fundamental theory to practical systems, and ultimately to real-world applications, in future wireless networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

Real-time wireless networks for industrial control systems

The next generation of industrial systems (Industry 4.0) will dramatically transform manyproductive sectors, integrating emerging concepts such as Internet of Things, artificialintelligence, big data, cloud robotics and virtual reality, to name a few. Most of thesetechnologies heavily rely on the availability of communication networks able to offernearly–istantaneous, secure and reliable data transfer. In the industrial sector, these tasks are nowadays mainly accomplished by wired networks, that combine the speed ofoptical fiber media with collision–free switching technology. However, driven by the pervasive deployment of mobile devices for personal com-munications in the last years, more and more industrial applications require wireless connectivity, which can bring enormous advantages in terms of cost reduction and flex-ibility. Designing timely, reliable and deterministic industrial wireless networks is a complicated task, due to the nature of the wireless channel, intrinsically error–prone andshared among all the devices transmitting on the same frequency band. In this thesis, several solutions to enhance the performance of wireless networks employed in industrial control applications are proposed. The presented approaches differ in terms of achieved performance and target applications, but they are all characterized by an improvement over existing industrial wireless solutions in terms of timeliness, reliability and determinism. When possible, an experimental validation of the designed solutions is provided. The obtained results prove that significant performance improvements are already possible, often using commercially available devices and preserving compliance to existing standards. Future research efforts, combined with the availability of new chipsets and standards, could lead to a world where wireless links effectively replace most of the existing cables in industrial environments, as it is already the case in the consumer market

Intelligent Circuits and Systems

ICICS-2020 is the third conference initiated by the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University that explored recent innovations of researchers working for the development of smart and green technologies in the fields of Energy, Electronics, Communications, Computers, and Control. ICICS provides innovators to identify new opportunities for the social and economic benefits of society.　 This conference bridges the gap between academics and R&D institutions, social visionaries, and experts from all strata of society to present their ongoing research activities and foster research relations between them. It provides opportunities for the exchange of new ideas, applications, and experiences in the field of smart technologies and finding global partners for future collaboration. The ICICS-2020 was conducted in two broad categories, Intelligent Circuits & Intelligent Systems and Emerging Technologies in Electrical Engineering

Performance and Security Enhancements in Practical Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communication systems achieve extremely high data rates and provide interference-free transmissions. to overcome high attenuations, they employ directional antennas that focus their energy in the intended direction. Transmissions can be steered such that signals only propagate within a specific area-of-interest. Although these advantages are well-known, they are not yet available in practical networks. IEEE 802.11ad, the recent standard for communications in the unlicensed 60 GHz band, exploits a subset of the directional propagation effects only. Despite the large available spectrum, it does not outperform other developments in the prevalent sub-6 GHz bands. This underutilization of directional communications causes unnecessary performance limitations and leaves a false sense of security. For example, standard compliant beam training is very time consuming. It uses suboptimal beam patterns, and is unprotected against malicious behaviors. Furthermore, no suitable research platform exists to validate protocols in realistic environments. To address these challenges, we develop a holistic evaluation framework and enhance the performance and security in practical mm-wave communication systems. Besides signal propagation analyses and environment simulations, our framework enables practical testbed experiments with off-the-shelf devices. We provide full access to a tri-band router’s operating system, modify the beam training operation in the Wi-Fi firmware, and create arbitrary beam patterns with the integrated antenna array. This novel approach allows us to implement custom algorithms such as a compressive sector selection that reduces the beam training overhead by a factor of 2.3. By aligning the receive beam, our adaptive beam switching algorithm mitigates interference from lateral directions and achieves throughput gains of up to 60%. With adaptive beam optimization, we estimate the current channel conditions and generate directional beams that implicitly exploit potential reflections in the environment. These beams increase the received signal strength by about 4.4 dB. While intercepting a directional link is assumed to be challenging, our experimental studies show that reflections on small-scale objects are sufficient to enable eavesdropping from afar. Additionally, we practically demonstrate that injecting forged feedback in the beam training enables Man-in-the Middle attacks. With only 7.3% overhead, our authentication scheme protects against this beam stealing and enforces responses to be only accepted from legitimate devices. By making beam training more efficient, effective, and reliable, our contributions finally enable practical applications of highly directional transmissions