Wireless communication and networking is increasingly prevalent in everyday life. This project focuses on exploiting the substantial number of degrees of freedom that are increasingly available at the physical layer to design and build multihop wireless networks with enhanced capacity, robustness, and usability. Our central objective is to identify how to best leverage these tradeoffs and experiment with complementary medium access control (MAC) protocols that are capable of doing so.
Our approach is an integrated one that focuses on cross-layer algorithm design and implementation. The focus is three fold: one, the development of a multi-hop wireless network prototype testbed - Hydra; two, the design and implementation of adaptive physical layer (PHY) modulation and coding schemes that significantly increase PHY flexibility; and three, the design and implementation of novel medium access control (MAC) algorithms that efficiently exploit the flexibility offered by next-generation PHYs. Our approach crosses the boundaries between both the physical layer and the networking layers and between theory and practice.
Perhaps the greatest impact of our work comes from designing and building a working prototype. This allows us to generate results that are extremely well grounded in physical reality, taking us away from the simulation-oriented approach that currently dominates wireless networking. These results will help to enable more effective wireless networks, especially those where data takes multiple wireless hops. We will disseminate our results through the production of students as well as the usual publication venues.
