Backbone-Assisted Wireless Local Area Network

Abstract

This article presents a cross-layer design of backbone-assisted wireless local area network (WLAN) for dense WLAN deployment. The popularity of 802.11-based WLANs leads to dense WLAN deployment in geographically limited space, including dense access points (AP) and dense users. With dense APs, an AP could overhear packets destined for other APs. Backbone-assisted WLAN is a new system architecture where cooperative APs share the overheard packets through a backbone network, thereby reducing packet retransmission and improving system throughput. Conventional WLAN, such as Wi-Fi, uses Stop-and-Wait ARQ. This article argues that Stop-and-Wait does not work well with backbone-assisted WLAN because of large backbone delays. We first show that with a variant of Selective Repeat ARQ tailored for backbone-assisted WLAN, a single-user backbone-assisted WLAN system can achieve substantial throughput improvement over that with Stop-and-Wait ARQ. Then, we put forth a new system architecture targeted for dense users, referred to as network-coded backbone-assisted WLAN, in which multiple users are allowed to transmit simultaneously. A distinguishing feature of this system is the joint use of physical-layer network-coding (PNC) decoding and multiuser decoding (MUD) in multipacket reception. This article is the first attempt to design an ARQ for multiuser backbone-assisted WLAN. Our overall system design solves a PNC sequence obfuscation problem and addresses long packet latency in Selective Repeat ARQ. Experiments on our software-defined radio prototype indicate that network-coded Ethernet-backbone-assisted WLAN can achieve high system throughput and low packet latency. Specifically, the system throughput can outperform an MUD-only multiuser WLAN and a single-user WLAN by 60 and 100 percent, respectively. Overall, we believe that network-coded backbone-assisted WLAN is a viable solution for boosting throughput and reducing latency in dense WLAN environments.