Re: [Cerowrt-devel] full duplex wifi?

2014-09-18 Thread dpreed

This is not completely crazy.  A couple of grad students and I demonstrated 
this type of thing with USRP's in my lab at MIT. The problem you, David Lang, 
refer to is basically the key thing to deal with, but the physics and 
information theory issues can be dealt with.
 
There's significant work in the RADAR (not radio) field that bears on the 
design of this.  I am sure there is more of that that is currently classified.
 
There are a lot of practical design issues in the front-end and the waveform 
design to be able to do this sort of thing well - especially in the field 
rather than the lab.   Your receive antenna will receive echoes of your own 
transmission that have to be separated from your signal and the source you are 
listening to.
 
Since this is full-duplex, there are only two signals involved and each knows 
its own signal's waveform pretty precisely - you can even attenuate the antenna 
output to get a precise measure of your signal.
 
So I think in a few years this might be practical - but a protocol to exploit 
this capability optimally would be complicated because of the need to 
compensate for the propagation environment effects.

On Tuesday, September 16, 2014 11:08pm, David Lang da...@lang.hm said:



 On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, David Lang wrote:
 
  On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, Dave Taht wrote:
 
  It would be very nice to get some TXOPs back:
 
  Is this crazy or not?
 
  http://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/sigcomm13-fullduplex.pdf
 
  I start of _extremely_ skeptical of the idea. While it would be a
  revolutionary improvement if it can work, there are some very basic points 
  of
  physics that make this very hard to achieve.
 
  If they can do it, they double the capacity of existing wireless systems,
  which helps, but it's not really that much (the multipath directed
  beamforming helps more)
 
  I'll read though the paper and comment more later.
 
 Ok, they are working on exacty the problem I described. They do a significant
 amount of the work in digital, which is probably why they get an 87% 
 improvement
 instead of a 2x improvement. This also will eat a fair bit of the DSP 
 processing
 capacity.
 
 As they note, this only works with single antenna systems. They list support 
 for
 multi-antenna systems as future work, and that's going to be quite a bit of 
 work
 (not impossible, but very hard)
 
 This will be a great thing for point-to-point infrastructure type links, but
 isn't that useful for more 'normal' situations (let alone high density
 environments)
 
 MIMO multi-destination can provide as much or more airtime saving when you
 actually have multiple places to send the data
 
 think of it as the core frequency vs core count type of tradeoff.
 
 David Lang
 
 
  warning, radio primer below
 
  the strength of a radio signal drops off FAST ( distance^3 in the worst 
  case,
  but close to distance^2 if you have pretty good antennas)
 
  you loose a lot of signal in the transition from the antenna wire to the air
  and from the air to the antenna wire.
 
  The result of this is that your inbound signal is incredibly tiny compared 
  to
  your outbound signal.
 
  In practice, this is dealt with by putting a very high power amplifier on 
  the
  inbound signal to make it large enough for our electronics to deal with. to
  do this effectively for signals that vary wildly in strength, this amplifier
  is variable, and amplifies all the signals that it gets until the strongest
  one is at the limits of the amplifier's output.
 
  Because of this, a receiver without a good input filter can get into a
  situation where it cannot recive it's desired signal because some other
  signal somewhat near the signal it wants is strong enough to cause problems.
 
  digital signal processing is no help here. If you digitize the signal (let's
  talk 8 bits for the moment, although 12-14 bits is more common in the real
  world), and you have one signal that's 100 times as strong as the other
  (which could be that one is 10 ft away and the other 100 ft away), the near
  signal is producing samples of 0-255, while the far signal is producing
  samples 0-2. there's not much you can do to get good fidelity when your only
  hvae 3 possible values for your data.
 
  Real radios deal with this by having analog filters to cut out the strong
  signal so that they can amplify the weak signal more before it hits the
  digital section.
 
  But if we are trying to transmit and receive at the same time, on the same
  channel, then we are back to the problem of the transmit vs receive power.
 
  Taking a sample radio, the Baofeng uv-5r handheld (because I happen to have
  it's stats handy)
 
  on transmit, it is producing 5w into a 50ohm load, or ~15v (v=sqrt(P*R)),
  while it is setup to receive signals of 0.2u volt.
 
  being able to cancel the transmitting signal perfectly enough to be able to
  transmit and at the same time receive a weak signal on a nearby frequency
  with the same antenna is a HARD thing 

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] full duplex wifi?

2014-09-18 Thread David Lang
You don't really know what you are transmitting unless you attenuate your 
transmitter output, and even then, the attenuator isn't going to be completely 
linear, so you have more of a close approsimation than precise information.


The problem of also seeing reflections of your transmission can be especially 
bad (and was not covered in the paper). If you have your AP sitting a couple 
feet from a mirror (or a mostly solid chunk of metal, like a cubical partition), 
you will get a strong reflection from that back into your AP, and this can 
overwelm more distant stations (this cannot be solved in the digital relm 
due to the problems I described earlier, and can only be solved in the RF relm 
by avoiding the problem with directional antennas)


Cutting down the power will help this sort of thing significantly, but until you 
cut the power down to _really_ low levels, not enough.


I can see cases where this would help, but I don't see this as something that 
will help in the general case.


David Lang

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014, dpr...@reed.com wrote:

This is not completely crazy.  A couple of grad students and I demonstrated 
this type of thing with USRP's in my lab at MIT. The problem you, David Lang, 
refer to is basically the key thing to deal with, but the physics and 
information theory issues can be dealt with.


There's significant work in the RADAR (not radio) field that bears on the 
design of this.  I am sure there is more of that that is currently classified.


There are a lot of practical design issues in the front-end and the waveform 
design to be able to do this sort of thing well - especially in the field 
rather than the lab.  Your receive antenna will receive echoes of your own 
transmission that have to be separated from your signal and the source you are 
listening to.


Since this is full-duplex, there are only two signals involved and each knows 
its own signal's waveform pretty precisely - you can even attenuate the 
antenna output to get a precise measure of your signal.


So I think in a few years this might be practical - but a protocol to exploit 
this capability optimally would be complicated because of the need to 
compensate for the propagation environment effects.


On Tuesday, September 16, 2014 11:08pm, David Lang da...@lang.hm said:




On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, David Lang wrote:

 On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, Dave Taht wrote:

 It would be very nice to get some TXOPs back:

 Is this crazy or not?

 http://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/sigcomm13-fullduplex.pdf

 I start of _extremely_ skeptical of the idea. While it would be a
 revolutionary improvement if it can work, there are some very basic points of
 physics that make this very hard to achieve.

 If they can do it, they double the capacity of existing wireless systems,
 which helps, but it's not really that much (the multipath directed
 beamforming helps more)

 I'll read though the paper and comment more later.

Ok, they are working on exacty the problem I described. They do a significant
amount of the work in digital, which is probably why they get an 87% improvement
instead of a 2x improvement. This also will eat a fair bit of the DSP processing
capacity.

As they note, this only works with single antenna systems. They list support for
multi-antenna systems as future work, and that's going to be quite a bit of work
(not impossible, but very hard)

This will be a great thing for point-to-point infrastructure type links, but
isn't that useful for more 'normal' situations (let alone high density
environments)

MIMO multi-destination can provide as much or more airtime saving when you
actually have multiple places to send the data

think of it as the core frequency vs core count type of tradeoff.

David Lang


 warning, radio primer below

 the strength of a radio signal drops off FAST ( distance^3 in the worst case,
 but close to distance^2 if you have pretty good antennas)

 you loose a lot of signal in the transition from the antenna wire to the air
 and from the air to the antenna wire.

 The result of this is that your inbound signal is incredibly tiny compared to
 your outbound signal.

 In practice, this is dealt with by putting a very high power amplifier on the
 inbound signal to make it large enough for our electronics to deal with. to
 do this effectively for signals that vary wildly in strength, this amplifier
 is variable, and amplifies all the signals that it gets until the strongest
 one is at the limits of the amplifier's output.

 Because of this, a receiver without a good input filter can get into a
 situation where it cannot recive it's desired signal because some other
 signal somewhat near the signal it wants is strong enough to cause problems.

 digital signal processing is no help here. If you digitize the signal (let's
 talk 8 bits for the moment, although 12-14 bits is more common in the real
 world), and you have one signal that's 100 times as strong as the other
 (which could be that one is 10 ft away and 

[Cerowrt-devel] full duplex wifi?

2014-09-16 Thread Dave Taht
It would be very nice to get some TXOPs back:

Is this crazy or not?

http://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/sigcomm13-fullduplex.pdf

-- 
Dave Täht

https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/make-wifi-fast
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Re: [Cerowrt-devel] full duplex wifi?

2014-09-16 Thread David Lang

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, Dave Taht wrote:


It would be very nice to get some TXOPs back:

Is this crazy or not?

http://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/sigcomm13-fullduplex.pdf


I start of _extremely_ skeptical of the idea. While it would be a revolutionary 
improvement if it can work, there are some very basic points of physics that 
make this very hard to achieve.


If they can do it, they double the capacity of existing wireless systems, which 
helps, but it's not really that much (the multipath directed beamforming helps 
more)


I'll read though the paper and comment more later.


warning, radio primer below

the strength of a radio signal drops off FAST ( distance^3 in the worst case, 
but close to distance^2 if you have pretty good antennas)


you loose a lot of signal in the transition from the antenna wire to the air and 
from the air to the antenna wire.


The result of this is that your inbound signal is incredibly tiny compared to 
your outbound signal.


In practice, this is dealt with by putting a very high power amplifier on the 
inbound signal to make it large enough for our electronics to deal with. to do 
this effectively for signals that vary wildly in strength, this amplifier is 
variable, and amplifies all the signals that it gets until the strongest one is 
at the limits of the amplifier's output.


Because of this, a receiver without a good input filter can get into a situation 
where it cannot recive it's desired signal because some other signal somewhat 
near the signal it wants is strong enough to cause problems.


digital signal processing is no help here. If you digitize the signal (let's 
talk 8 bits for the moment, although 12-14 bits is more common in the real 
world), and you have one signal that's 100 times as strong as the other (which 
could be that one is 10 ft away and the other 100 ft away), the near signal is 
producing samples of 0-255, while the far signal is producing samples 0-2. 
there's not much you can do to get good fidelity when your only hvae 3 possible 
values for your data.


Real radios deal with this by having analog filters to cut out the strong signal 
so that they can amplify the weak signal more before it hits the digital 
section.


But if we are trying to transmit and receive at the same time, on the same 
channel, then we are back to the problem of the transmit vs receive power.


Taking a sample radio, the Baofeng uv-5r handheld (because I happen to have it's 
stats handy)


on transmit, it is producing 5w into a 50ohm load, or ~15v (v=sqrt(P*R)), while 
it is setup to receive signals of 0.2u volt.


being able to cancel the transmitting signal perfectly enough to be able to 
transmit and at the same time receive a weak signal on a nearby frequency with 
the same antenna is a HARD thing to do, and the tools to do so tend to be very 
finicky (read temperature sensitive)


David Lang
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