Last One Standing: Building a Wireless Link That Survives in Challenging Environments

Wireless systems operating in congested spectral environments are heavily resource-constrained and compete with unknown networks or adversaries. Real-time adaptation of the waveform over the continuum of the accessible frequency spectrum is key to resilient communications. In this paper, we design and implement an autonomous high-throughput interference-avoiding wireless transceiver on a system-on-chip (SoC)-based software-defined radio (SDR). Our transceiver dynamically optimizes coded repeats of a basic square-root raised cosine (SRRC) pulse over a binary antipodal alphabet and provides the optimal waveform to carry the information symbols. We evaluate the survivability of our link in the presence of different levels of co-channel interference in an indoor SDR testbed. We show that increasing the number of repetitions of the code-optimized pulses offers a graceful tradeoff between data rate and interference avoidance.