The conventional high-speed Wi-Fi has recently become a contender for
low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications. OFDM continues its adoption
in the new IoT Wi-Fi standard due to its spectrum efficiency that can support
the demand of massive IoT connectivity. While the IoT Wi-Fi standard offers
many new features to improve power and spectrum efficiency, the basic physical
layer (PHY) structure of transceiver design still conforms to its conventional
design rationale where access points (AP) and clients employ the same OFDM PHY.
In this paper, we argue that current Wi-Fi PHY design does not take full
advantage of the inherent asymmetry between AP and IoT. To fill the gap, we
propose an asymmetric design where IoT devices transmit uplink packets using
the lowest power while pushing all the decoding burdens to the AP side. Such a
design utilizes the sufficient power and computational resources at AP to trade
for the transmission (TX) power of IoT devices. The core technique enabling
this asymmetric design is that the AP takes full power of its high clock rate
to boost the decoding ability. We provide an implementation of our design and
show that it can reduce the IoT's TX power by boosting the decoding capability
at the receivers