At IEEE BlackSeaCom 2018, WNL Presents Experimental Results on Interference Study

Wireless Networks Lab presents the experimental results on interference study at the IEEE International Black Sea Conference on Communications and Networking (BlackSeaCom). The conference is held on June 4–7, 2018, in Batumi, Georgia. It is a significant scientific event with diverse program and opportunities, which covers both theoretical and systems-integration research in all aspects of telecommunications.

 

At IEEE BlackSeaCom WNL team shows the latest developments on Wi-Fi networks in the paper entitled ‘Testbed to Study the Capture Effect: Can We Rely on This Effect in Modern Wi-Fi Networks’. WNL research sheds the light on fundamentals of packet reception in Wi-Fi devices. According to standard, fully or partially overlapping packet transmissions lead to collision and loss of both packets. This rule becomes harmful in dense network with strong interference caused by hidden stations from neighbour local networks. In reality, sometimes at least one packet can survive, if its receive power is higher than the receive power of another packet by some value. The ability of a device to receive the stronger packet if it comes later than the weaker one is called capture effect.

 

To find out whether real devices overcome standard, Aleksey Kureev, Ilya Levitsky and Evgeny Khorov build a simple SDR-based testbed that allows generating pairs of packets with predefined power and offset. Thus, every wireless off-the-shelf device can be tested for presence of Capture Effect without any driver modifications. WNL researchers tested more than 20 devices and show that not all of them follow the standard and do not capture the stronger frame during reception of the body of a weaker frame. Moreover, researchers presented obtained results on IEEE meeting on 802.11ax and showed how current packet reception rule limits the performance of Wi-Fi networks in scenarios with hidden stations.

 

The IEEE BlackSeaCom series of conferences are held in the countries surrounding the Black Sea. The goal of the IEEE BlackSeaCom is to bring together visionaries in academia, research labs and industry from all over the world to the shores of the Black Sea. In 2019 the conference will be held in Russia for the first time.

Wireless Networks Lab is a ‘Megagrant’ lab established in 2017 around the project on Cloudified Wireless Networks for 5G and beyond, led by Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz. The team regularly reports at leading IEEE conferences, runs industrial projects and contributes to standardization of wireless networks.