Distributed Spectrum Access: Protocols & Prototype

July 26, 2007
Ashutosh Sabharwal | Rice University

In this two-part talk, we will first present techniques for harnessing unused capacity in wireless networks. The key operating concept is that of connectionless protocols, where nodes do not communicate on a link-by-link basis with other contending links, and all coordination is performed via broadcasts. We consider both passive and active connectionless control, which allows us to either achieve the greedy competitive or socially fair equilibrium.

In the second part, we will demo the Rice Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP), which is a completely programmable platform to prototype novel physical and network layer protocols (like those presented in the first part). Specifically, we will present the hardware & software architecture, and the design flow to prototype new cross-layer protocols. As an example of testing clean-slate concepts, we will discuss our recent results on building cooperative communications, which is symbol time-scale cooperation between distributed nodes (network coding at physical layer).

Speaker Details

Ashu Sabharwal is the Director of Center for Multimedia Communications at Rice University. His main research interests are information theoretic foundations, protocols and platforms for high performance wireless networks.