AirSync: Enabling Distributed Multiuser MIMO with Full Spatial Multiplexing

The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points per square mile has the potential to successfully meet the increasing demand for more bandwidth. In theory, the best approach to density increase is via distributed multiuser MIMO, where several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multi-antenna access point, ensuring that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating "interference." In practice, while enterprise networks offer a natural setup in which distributed MIMO might be possible, there are serious implementation difficulties, the primary one being the need to eliminate phase and timing offsets between the jointly coordinated access points. In this paper we propose AirSync, a novel scheme which provides not only time but also phase synchronization, thus enabling distributed MIMO with full spatial multiplexing gains. AirSync locks the phase of all access points using a common reference broadcasted over the air in conjunction with a Kalman filter which closely tracks the phase drift. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the FPGA of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprised of two access points and two clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve phase synchronization within a few degrees, and allows the system to nearly achieve the theoretical optimal multiplexing gain. We also discuss MAC and higher layer aspects of a practical deployment. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first ever realization of the full multiuser MIMO gain, namely the ability to increase the number of wireless clients linearly with the number of jointly coordinated access points, without reducing the per client rate.Comment: Submitted to Transactions on Networkin

Spatial channel characterization for smart antenna solutions in FDD wireless networks

This paper introduces a novel metric for determining the spatial decorrelation between the up- and down-link wireless bearers in frequency division duplex (FDD) networks. This metric has direct relevance to smart or adaptive antenna array base-station deployments in cellular networks, which are known to offer capacity enhancement when compared to fixed coverage solutions. In particular, the results presented were obtained from field trial measurement campaigns for both urban and rural scenarios, with the observations having a direct impact on the choice of down-link beamforming architecture in FDD applications. Further, it is shown that significant spatial decorrelation can occur in urban deployments for bearer separations as small as 5 MHz. Results are presented in terms of both instantaneous characteristics as well as time averaged estimates, thus facilitating the appraisal of smart antenna solutions in both packet and circuit switched network

Efficient, Near Complete and Often Sound Hybrid Dynamic Data Race Prediction (extended version)

Dynamic data race prediction aims to identify races based on a single program run represented by a trace. The challenge is to remain efficient while being as sound and as complete as possible. Efficient means a linear run-time as otherwise the method unlikely scales for real-world programs. We introduce an efficient, near complete and often sound dynamic data race prediction method that combines the lockset method with several improvements made in the area of happens-before methods. By near complete we mean that the method is complete in theory but for efficiency reasons the implementation applies some optimizations that may result in incompleteness. The method can be shown to be sound for two threads but is unsound in general. We provide extensive experimental data that shows that our method works well in practice.Comment: typos, appendi