WiFi: Load balancing through probe response control

Basic Idea:

Clients use probe requests as one of the first frames before connecting to an access point (AP). If the AP does not respond with a probe-response frame, the client will not proceed with the connection. We leverage this condition to control how clients are distributed across multiple access points in the network. This approach to client - balancing has the advantage that:

1. Load both RF and CPU are balanced across the APs.

2. No disconnect/connect is required for load balancing.

3. Leverages the fact that typical WLAN mobility is pseudo-static. So clients will not move significantly from the places where they connect. Even in case of mobility, the disruption is minimal.

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WLAN Interference control through Antenna Selection (ASEL)

In this work, we present a novel, robust scheme for high density WLAN deployments. This scheme uses well known selection diversity at the transmitter. We show that our scheme increases the number of simultaneous transmissions at any given time without excessive overhead (compared to other schemes such as Multi-user MIMO). Furthermore, this scheme can be easily implemented using existing standards.

The main contributions that come out of this report are:

1. a simple method to tackle interference in the network by selecting the best antenna during 

transmission. 

2. A high potential to reduce the collisions for hidden node terminals. 

3. Further, we also proposed a mechanism to account for the next wave of 802.11ac by allowing simultaneous transmission from multiple APs on the same channel.

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Reliable Multicast for Enterprise WLANs

In this work, we have presented a complete end-end architecture to employ the rate-less codes. We have developed a new architecture Rate-less Codes Multicast (RCNC). This architecture is shown to provide high throughput gains, reliability and near optimal throughput performance.

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Hybrid Wireless Virtualization Architecture

This project presents the design of the hybrid wireless virtualization (HWV) controller based network architecture. Using a HWV controller, an unified approach can be taken for provisioning and management of virtualized heterogeneous radios, irrespective of their MAC and PHY mechanisms. It is shown that the airtime occupancy by transmissions from different slices or groups can be used as a single metric for tying these virtualized platforms.