Enabling Low-Power OFDM for IoT by Exploiting Asymmetric Clock Rates

Abstract

The conventional high-speed Wi-Fi has recently become a contender for low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications. OFDM continues its adoption in the new IoT Wi-Fi standard due to its spectrum efficiency that can support the demand of massive IoT connectivity. While the IoT Wi-Fi standard offers many new features to improve power and spectrum efficiency, the basic physical layer (PHY) structure of transceiver design still conforms to its conventional design rationale where access points (AP) and clients employ the same OFDM PHY. In this paper, we argue that current Wi-Fi PHY design does not take full advantage of the inherent asymmetry between AP and IoT. To fill the gap, we propose an asymmetric design where IoT devices transmit uplink packets using the lowest power while pushing all the decoding burdens to the AP side. Such a design utilizes the sufficient power and computational resources at AP to trade for the transmission (TX) power of IoT devices. The core technique enabling this asymmetric design is that the AP takes full power of its high clock rate to boost the decoding ability. We provide an implementation of our design and show that it can reduce up to 88% of the IoT’s TX power when the AP sets $8\times $ clock rate.