Wideband Spectrum Adaptation Without Coordination

Abstract

Fixed channelization configuration in today's wireless devices falls inefficient in the presence of growing data traffic and heterogeneous devices. In this regard, a number of fairly recent studies have provided spectrum adaptation capabilities for current wireless devices, however, they are limited to inband adaptation or incur substantial coordination overhead. The target of this paper is to fill the gaps in spectrum adaptation by overcoming these limitations. We propose Seer , a frame-level wideband spectrum adaptation solution which consists of two major components: i) a specially-constructed preamble that can be detected by receivers with arbitrary RF bands, and ii) a spectrum detection algorithm that identifies the desired transmission band in the context of multiple asynchronous senders by exploiting the preamble's temporal and spectral properties. Seer can be realized on commodity radios, and can be easily integrated into devices running different PHY/MAC protocols. We have prototyped Seer on the GNURadio/USRP platform to demonstrate its feasibility. Furthermore, using 1.6GHz channel measurements and trace-driven simulations, we have evaluated the merits of Seer over state-of-the-art approaches.