TY - GEN
T1 - Expanding the Role of Preambles to Support User-defined Functionality in MIMO-based WLANs
AU - Zhang, Zhengguang
AU - Rahbari, Hanif
AU - Krunz, Marwan
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research was supported in part by NSF (grants CNS-1513649, CNS-1563655, CNS-1731164, CNS-1813401, and IIP-1822071) and by the Broadband Wireless Access Applications Center (BWAC). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - As the Wi-Fi technology goes through its sixth generation (Wi-Fi 6), there is a growing consensus on the need to support security and coordination functions at the Physical (PHY) layer, beyond traditional functions such as frame detection and rate adaptation. In contrast to the costly approach of extending the PHY-layer header to support new functions (e.g., Target Wake Time field in 802.11ax), we propose to turn a specific part of the frame preamble into a data field while maintaining its primary functions. Specifically, in this paper, we develop a scheme called extensible preamble modulation (ePMod) for the MIMO-based 802.11ac protocol. For each frame, eP-Mod can embed up to 20 bits into the 802.11ac preamble under 1 × 2 or 2 × 1 MIMO transmission modes to support the operations of a given PHY-layer function. The proposed scheme enables several promising PHY-layer services, such as PHY-layer encryption and channel/device authentication, PHYlayer signaling, etc. At the same time, it allows legacy (eP-Modunaware) devices to continue to process the received preamble as normal by guaranteeing that our proposed preamble waveforms satisfy the structural properties of a standardized preamble. Through numerical analysis, extensive simulations, and hardware experiments, we validate the practicality and reliability of ePMod.
AB - As the Wi-Fi technology goes through its sixth generation (Wi-Fi 6), there is a growing consensus on the need to support security and coordination functions at the Physical (PHY) layer, beyond traditional functions such as frame detection and rate adaptation. In contrast to the costly approach of extending the PHY-layer header to support new functions (e.g., Target Wake Time field in 802.11ax), we propose to turn a specific part of the frame preamble into a data field while maintaining its primary functions. Specifically, in this paper, we develop a scheme called extensible preamble modulation (ePMod) for the MIMO-based 802.11ac protocol. For each frame, eP-Mod can embed up to 20 bits into the 802.11ac preamble under 1 × 2 or 2 × 1 MIMO transmission modes to support the operations of a given PHY-layer function. The proposed scheme enables several promising PHY-layer services, such as PHY-layer encryption and channel/device authentication, PHYlayer signaling, etc. At the same time, it allows legacy (eP-Modunaware) devices to continue to process the received preamble as normal by guaranteeing that our proposed preamble waveforms satisfy the structural properties of a standardized preamble. Through numerical analysis, extensive simulations, and hardware experiments, we validate the practicality and reliability of ePMod.
KW - IEEE 802.11ac
KW - MIMO
KW - OFDM
KW - Preamble embedding
KW - USRP experiments
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U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM41043.2020.9155507
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM41043.2020.9155507
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85090288153
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
SP - 1191
EP - 1200
BT - INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 38th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2020
Y2 - 6 July 2020 through 9 July 2020
ER -