Embracing adjacent channel interference in next generation Wi-Fi networks

Emerging Wi-Fi Standards have incorporated growing channel widths to meet the proliferation of wireless services. Wider channel, unfortunately, increases the probability of partial channel overlap, and thus introduces more adjacent channel interference (ACI) than ever. Prior work either tries to avoid ACI, or neglects it in a brute-force way. In this paper, we carefully investigate the interference pattern at physical layer (PHY), and propose interference randomization (InterRandom) to strategically harness ACI for simultaneous transmission. The key insight behind InterRandom is to randomize the interference according to the overlapped ratio, and utilize coding redundancy to recover the corrupted data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of InterRandom, we further propose an InterRandom-enabled Media Access Control layer (MAC) protocol to facilitate Wi-Fi infrastructure mode transmission. We verify the feasibility of InterRandom on GNU radio testbed. Furthermore, our trace-driven simulations show that, InterRandom-aware MAC achieves 190% throughput gain compared to the legacy 802.11ac.