DOF: a local wireless information plane

Abstract

The ability to detect what unlicensed radios are operating in a neigh borhood, their spectrum occupancies and the spatial directions their signals are traversing is a fundamental primitive needed by many applications, ranging from smart radios to coexistence to network management to security. In this paper we present DOF, a detector that in a single framework accurately estimates all three parameters. DOF builds on the insight that in most wireless protocols, there are hidden repeating patterns in the signals that can be used to construct unique signatures, and accurately estimate signal types and their spectral and spatial parameters. We show via experimental evaluation in an indoor testbed that DOF is robust and accurate, it achieves greater than 85% accuracy even when the SNRs of the detected signals are as low as 0 dB, and even when there are multiple interfering signals present. To demonstrate the benefits of DOF, we design and implement a preliminary prototype of a smart radio that operates on top of DOF, and show experimentally that it provides a 80% increase in throughput over Jello, the best known prior implementation, while causing less than 10% performance drop for co-existing WiFi and Zigbee radios.