The explosion of cellular communications has lead to a tremendous body of work on sophisticated wireless communication techniques many of which require knowledge of wireless channel state information (CSI). However, very little of this work has been applied to wireless networks where nodes communicate over multiple hops and where distributed rather than centralized solutions are required.
Taking advantage of this opportunity requires a marriage of physical layer, medium access control, and networking expertise to use CSI to improve network capacity, throughput, and reliability, and to reduce delay. New algorithms and protocols are being developed that span the protocol stack to provide effective sharing of CSI. These techniques are being validated by using a novel, open source, multihop, multiantenna, wireless network testbed - Hydra.
Contributions will include: . Development of strategies for using feedback to effectively share CSI. . Development of multiuser channel models, both to aid in the dissemination of CSI and also to facilitate accurate network level simulation of feedback based systems. . Demonstrating the use of CSI to allow practical exploitation of the relay channel at the level of the network.
In addition to the usual dissemination of research results through the production of students and scholarly papers, the Hydra prototype itself will be available to other researchers. Since Hydra is open source and based on inexpensive hardware, these outside groups will be able to test and build upon the results from this research program.
