WNL Lab Presents NOMA Wi-Fi Testbed with Constellation Rotation at the IEEE INFOCOM 2020

The paper “Prototyping NOMA Constellation Rotation in Wi-Fi” by WNL members Evgeny Khorov, Aleksey Kureev, Ilya Levitsky, and Ian F. Akyildiz and the new version of NOMA Wi-Fi Prototype released in 2020 will be presented at the #1 conference in telecommunications: IEEE INFOCOM 2020.

The prototype is modified to enable transmission and reception of NOMA frames, where the secondary constellations that have lower power can now be rotated by 0, 45, or 90 degrees. The 90 degrees rotation makes BPSK x BPSK composite constellations resemble ordinary QPSK constellations, which helps further stations to decode them. The 45 degrees rotation assists the closer stations to decode the lower-power signal affected by the phase noise. This type of noise was noticed during the experiments in the previous work with the NOMA prototype. The 45 degrees rotation was proposed by the WNL members to minimize the effect of phase noise. It helps in the cases when BPSK constellation is superposed with a non-BPSK square QAM constellation. The benefit of using constellation rotation can reach 3.5 dB of SNR in a 50%-tile frame receive ratio.

IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM) is a top-ranked conference on networking in the research community. It is a major conference venue for researchers to present and exchange significant and innovative contributions and ideas in the field of networking and closely related areas. IEEE INFOCOM covers both theoretical and systems research. For INFOCOM 2020, the conference includes a main technical program, a number of workshops, a keynote speech, panels, a student poster session, and demo/poster sessions.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the INFOCOM conference, including the demo session, goes online. It means that the WNL team will prepare a video for online presentation, explaining the new NOMA prototype operation and demonstrating the benefit of the innovations.

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 the standardization of wireless networks.