WNL members Evgeny Khorov and Ilya Levitsky present NOMA-Wi-Fi testbed results at IEEE 802 Plenary

IEEE 802 Plenary Session was held on March 10-15 in Vancouver, Canada. The IEEE 802 Standards Committee develops and maintains networking standards and recommended practices for local, metropolitan, and other area networks, using an open and accredited process, and advocates them on a global basis. Each Plenary Session leads and represents variety of Working Groups providing focus on the most wide-used networking standards. WNL members participate in the activities of the IEEE 802.11 Working Group that develops Wi-Fi.

At the IEEE 802 Plenary, WNL members Evgeny Khorov and Ilya Levitsky presented NOMA-Wi-Fi testbed results. NOMA is a promising technique to multiplex users, using the same time-frequency resources. The basic idea of NOMA is that Access Point (AP) is able to serve multiple stations simultaneously in the same baseband by allocating portions of the total transmission power for each station. It is done in a such way that each station is able to isolate its own information from the total signal sent by the AP.

In the traditional access point, NOMA AP uses Superposition Coding to transmit multiple frames in one stream, and the stations use Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) to receive their frame from the stream.  Semi-Orthogonal Multiple Access (SOMA) is a sort of NOMA that does not require SIC, which makes it easy to implement.

WNL has implemented both approaches in Wi-Fi using software-defined radio. The initial version of prototype was presented at 2018 IEEE 29th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (E. Khorov, A. Kureev, and I. Levitsky, “NOMA Testbed on Wi-Fi”). The designed protocol is fully backward compatible. It means that one of the devices can be a legacy one without any upgrades. This is a very strong advantage of the designed approach, since many devices of various generations often communicate in a single Wi-Fi network.

The experimental results show the gain up to 40% in geometric mean throughput in comparison to legacy time division used in Wi-Fi networks. The results were discussed with engineers from large telecommunication vendors, who provided valuable feedback.

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.