Quantize-map-forward (QMF) relaying: an experimental study

ABSTRACT

We present the design and experimental evaluation of a wireless system that exploits relaying in the context of WiFi. We opt for WiFi given its popularity and wide spread use for a number of applications, such as smart homes. Our testbed consists of three nodes, a source, a relay and a destination, that operate using the physical layer procedures of IEEE802.11. We deploy three main competing strategies that have been proposed for relaying, Decode-and-Forward (DF), Amplify-and-Forward (AF) and Quantize-Map-Forward (QMF). QMF is the most recently introduced of the three, and although it was shown in theory to approximately achieve the capacity of arbitrary wireless networks, its performance in practice had not been evaluated. We present in this work experimental results---to the best of our knowledge, the first ones---that compare QMF, AF and DF in a realistic indoor setting. We find that QMF is a competitive scheme to the other two, offering in some cases up to 12% throughput benefits and up to 60% improvement in frame error-rates over the next best scheme.

References

1. Local and metropolitan area networks-specific requirements part 11: Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications. IEEE Std 802.11-2012.
2. WARP Project, http://warpproject.org.
3. Alamouti, S. A simple transmit diversity technique for wireless communications. IEEE Journal on Select Areas in Communications 16, 8 (October 1998), 1451--1458.
4. Atsan, E., Knopp, R., Diggavi, S., and Fragouli, C. Towards integrating quantize-map-forward relaying into LTE. In Proceedings of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (September 2012), pp. 212--216.
5. Avestimehr, A. S., Diggavi, S. N., and Tse, D. N. C. Wireless network information flow: A deterministic approach. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 57, 4 (April 2011), 1872--1905.
6. Balan, H. V., Rogalin, R., Michaloliakos, A., Psounis, K., and Caire, G. AirSync: Enabling distributed multiuser MIMO with full spatial multiplexing. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 99 (2013).
7. Bradford, G., and Laneman, J. N. An experimental framework for the evaluation of cooperative diversity. In Proceedings of the IEEE CISS (March 2009), pp. 641--645.
8. Bradford, G., and Laneman, J. N. A survey of implementation efforts and experimental design for cooperative communications. In Proceedings of the IEEE ICASSP (2010), pp. 5602--5605.
9. Chang, K. et al. Relay operation in 802.11ad. In IEEE 802.11ad TGad 1-/0494r1 (2010).
10. Cover, T. M., and Gamal, A. E. Capacity theorems for the relay channel. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 25, 5 (September 1979), 572--584.
11. Hunter, C., Murphy, P., and Sabharwal, A. Real-time testbed implementation of a distributed cooperative MAC and PHY. In Proceedings of the IEEE CISS (March 2010), pp. 1--6.
12. Knox, M., and Erkip, E. Implementation of cooperative communications using software defined radios. In Proceedings of the IEEE ICASSP (March 2010), pp. 5618--5621.
13. Korakis, T., Knox, M., Erkip, E., and Panwar, S. Cooperative network implementation using open-source platforms. IEEE Communications Magazine 47, 2 (2009), 134--141.
14. Lim, S. H., Kim, Y.-H., Gamal, A. E., and Chung, S.-Y. Noisy network coding. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 57, 5 (May 2011), 3132--3152.
15. Liu, P., Tao, Z., Narayanan, S., Korakis, T., and Panwar, S. CoopMAC: A cooperative MAC for wireless LANs. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 25, 2 (February 2007), 340--354.
16. Loiacono, M., Rosca, J., and Trappe, W. The snowball effect: Detailing performance anomalies of 802.11 rate adaptation. In Proceedings of the IEEE GLOBECOM (November 2007), pp. 5117--5122.
17. Murphy, P. Design, Implementation, and Characterization of a Cooperative Communications System. PhD thesis, Rice University, 2010.
18. Murphy, P., and Sabharwal, A. Design, implementation, and characterization of a cooperative communications system. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 60, 6 (July 2011), 2534--2544.
19. Nagpal, V., Wang, I.-H., Jorgovanovic, M., Tse, D., and Nikolic, B. Coding and system design for quantize-map-and-forward relaying. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (August 2013). See also arXiv:1209.4679 {cs.IT}.
20. Ozgur, A., and Diggavi, S. Approximately achieving Gaussian relay network capacity with lattice codes. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (June 2010), pp. 669--673. See also arXiv:1005.1284 {cs.IT}.
21. Rahul, H., Hassanieh, H., and Katabi, D. SourceSync: a distributed wireless architecture for exploiting sender diversity. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM (August 2010), pp. 171--182.
22. Sengupta, A., Brahma, S., Ozgur, A., Fragouli, C., and Diggavi, S. Graph-based codes for quantize-map-and-forward relaying. In Proceedings of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (October 2011), pp. 140--144.
23. Sun, T., Zhang, Y., and Trappe, W. Improving access point association protocols through channel utilization and adaptive switching. In Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-Hoc and Sensor Systems (October 2011), pp. 155--157.
24. Tse, D., and Viswanath, P. Fundamentals of Wireless Communication. Cambridge University Press, May 2005.
25. Zhang, J., Jia, J., Zhang, Q., and Lo, E. M. K. Implementation and evaluation of cooperative communication schemes in software-defined radio testbed. In Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM (March 2010), pp. 1307--1315.
26. Zhang, X., and Shin, K. G. DAC: Distributed asynchronous cooperation for wireless relay networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM (March 2010), pp. 1064--1072.

Index Terms

• Networks

  • Network types

    • Mobile networks

    • Wireless access networks

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software development techniques

      • Error handling and recovery