WNL members participate in IEEE BlackSeaCom 2024

In June 2024, seven Wireless Networks Lab members participated in the IEEE BlackSeaCom 2024 conference. The conference took place in Tbilisi, Georgia. Evgeny Khorov, head of WNL, gave a tutorial and participated in a panel, WNL students Egor Endovitskiy, Anton Kurapov, Artem Otmakhov, Andrey Tyarin and Roman Zlobin presented five papers, and WNL member Dmitry Bankov organized a demo session at the conference. The research has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grants 21-79-10431 and 23-19-00756).

The tutorial “Towards Ultra Reliable Wi-Fi” presented by Prof. Evgeny Khorov explains the main features of modern Wi-Fi, including MU-MIMO and OFDMA, multi-link operation and others introduced in the recently released IEEE 802.11ax standard aka Wi-Fi 6 and IEEE 802.11be aka Wi-Fi 7 that is under development now. It elaborated on the encountered challenge to guarantee quality of service for real-time applications, though the latter is its key target. It also describes how the Wi-Fi 8 technology, the development of which commenced in 2023, aims to tackle this challenge by promising ultra-high reliability. The tutorial considers how promising approaches are being implemented in the future Wi-Fi standard, what and why is left beyond the scope of the standard, and how the research community can contribute to enhancing user experience in Wi-Fi networks.

The paper “Impact of Explicit Channel Sounding Period on the Wi-Fi MU-MIMO Performance” by Egor Endovitskiy, Sergei Tutelian, Kirill Chemrov, Vyacheslav Loginov and Evgeny Khorov extends the ns-3 Wi-Fi model to consider MIMO features, including sounding protocol, channel aging, adaptive scheduling, and selection of spatial streams. Using extensive simulations, it analyzes the influence of sounding period on multi-user MIMO performance in different scenarios. The paper shows that in many scenarios, a single quasi-optimal period exists, which provides a throughput just 10% smaller than that of the optimal period found by exhaustive search. Finally, the scenarios where the quasi-optimal period leads to high throughput loss are described and recommendations on sounding period selection are given.

The paper “LTI: Encrypted Traffic Classification Framework Considering Data Drift” by Anton Kurapov, Danil Shamsimukhametov, Mikhail Liubogoshchev and Evgeny Khorov considers the problems that arise while solving the traffic classification (TC) problem. The first one relates to the evolution rate of different web services, and, therefore, to the required traffic datasets update and TC algorithm retrain frequency. The second challenge relates to the efficiency and complexity of the dataset’s autonomous update and labeling. This challenge is specifically crucial for further enhancement of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol with the Encrypted ClientHello (ECH) amendment that encrypts the remaining sensitive data in the TLS exchange procedure. The paper proposes the Local Traffic Insights (LTI) framework which enables accurate TC based on locally and autonomously collected and labeled traffic datasets. The paper shows that it is sufficient to update the dataset and retrain the state-of-the-art TC algorithm hRFTC once a month, to achieve accurate TC.

The paper “Enhancing 5G V2X Mode 2 for Sporadic Traffic” by Dmitry Bankov, Artem Krasilov, Artem Otmakhov, Aleksei Shashin and Evgeny Khorov considers the 5G Vehicle-to-Everything (5G V2X) technology and studies a scenario with sporadic traffic, e.g., a vehicle generates a packet at a random time moment when it detects a dangerous situation on the road, which imposes strict requirements on delay and reliability. To satisfy strict delay requirements, vehicles use the Mode 2 channel access method. The paper analyzes the performance of Mode 2 for sporadic traffic and proposes several approaches to improve it. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches can increase the system capacity by up to 40% with a low impact on complexity.

The paper “3D-PRISE: 3D-Printed Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Element” by Andrey Tyarin, Kirill Glinskiy, Aleksey Kureev and Evgeny Khorov presents the design, fabrication, and experimental validation of a 3D-printed 1-bit Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Element (3D-PRISE) that leverages the advantages of additive manufacturing. The proposed 3D-PRISE design uses 3D printing to achieve a low-cost RIS element with wide operational bandwidth. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the 3D-printed dielectric material properties and rigorous experimental validation of the 3D-PRISE performance. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the 3D-printed RIS element, with measured phase shift ensuring the operational bandwidth of 200 MHz. This work illustrates the potential of additive manufacturing to enable scalable and cost-effective deployment of RIS in next-generation wireless systems.

The paper “Wi-Fi Receiver with Smoothed Equalization for Reliable Reception of Non-orthogonal Streams” by Roman Zlobin, Aleksey Kureev, Kirill Glinskiy and Evgeny Khorov proposes a novel approach to improve the performance of Wi-Fi receivers for uplink non-orthogonal multiple access in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise and phase noise. The proposed solution incorporates a low-complex smoothing technique at the equalization stage and the frame format to mitigate the effects of inaccurate frequency synchronization. Experimental results demonstrate a 4% average improvement in frame receive ratio at an 11-dB signal-to-noise ratio level of the weaker frame in uplink transmission.

During the panel on Emerging 6G Technologies, Key Synergies, Use Cases, and New Opportunities with Egon A. Schulz (Huawei Technologies, Germany), Evgeny Khorov (IITP RAS, Russia), Mohamed-Slim Alouini (KAUST, Saudi Arabia), Mohammad Shikh-Bahaei (King’s College London, UK), and Albena Mihovska (SmartAvatar B.V., Netherlands), the participants discussed emerging 6G technologies aligning with the 6G/IMT-2030 framework. They have explored such promising directions as incorporating machine learning and AI algorithms, robotics/digital twins, intelligent metasurfaces for 6G, as well as integrated NTN-TN connectivity, integrated sensing and communications.