MSU Technologies

Adaptive Channel Bonding in Multicarrier Wireless Networks

Introduction

To support high data rate applications such as video conferencing and multimedia streaming, the ongoing standardization of the next generation Wi-Fi increases the channel bonding. However, inefficiency and unfairness issues arise when devices that use different channel widths coexist in a contention domain. Instead of increasing channel width, an alternative is to use multiple narrow channels independently. Although the use of narrow channels addresses the inefficiency, the complexity of a compound radio design hinders the adoption of the method in consideration of implementation cost.

Description of Technology

This technology is a dynamic channel bonding protocol in which a node is allowed to start a transmission as long as a narrow channel is available and gradually increase channel width during transmission whenever a new narrow channel becomes available. This method aggregates all available narrow channels as one wide channel, removing the need of setting guard bands between contiguous narrow channels. A challenge in dynamic channel bonding is the communication over uncertain channels. To enable fast spectrum agreement between transmitter and receiver, a partial spectrum correlation method is implemented. When new channels become available, multiple nodes may contend for them. A compound preamble is designed to make collisions detectable in the frequency domain and a parallel bitwise arbitration mechanism is used to quickly resolve the collisions in the time domain.

Key Benefits