ERI: Pushing the Limits of WiFi Technology for Non-Mission-Critical and Mission-Critical Applications

Despite the ease of deployment and prevalence of WiFi (a.k.a., 802.11) devices, the resource-constraint Internet of Things (IoT) devices used in residential and campus environments struggle to meet the necessary energy efficiency and communication delay requirements to address applications’ demands. In addition, although the high data rates offered by WiFi can satisfy the communication rate requirements of mission-critical applications such as industrial automation, the complexity and unpredictability of the WiFi stack make new applications development an impractical undertaking.

The proposed research investigates and develops new methodologies, algorithms, and software frameworks to facilitate the development of new classes of WiFi-based applications and services.

This research targets two broad classes of applications: (i) non-mission-critical systems where regular user devices (e.g., smartphones, laptops) and IoT devices (e.g., cameras, thermostats, smoke detectors) coexist, and (ii) mission-critical systems where deterministic end-to-end delays

between devices and controllers (i.e., control loop) must be enforced. Towards facilitating innovation in the realm of WiFi communication and investigating the operation of these networks, this research proposes a software framework for scalable and programmable monitoring of the

WiFi stack. In addition, a reference testbed design and traffic characterization and generation methods are developed to build testbeds that represent real-world deployment scenarios. For non-mission-critical systems, new methods will be developed to enhance IoT devices' energy

efficiency and communication timeliness in environments exhibiting dynamic traffic patterns. Specifically, this research introduces packet delivery delay prediction as a novel approach to develop methods for improving devices' communication delay and energy efficiency. Third, for mission-critical applications such as industrial automation, this research will develop a framework that integrates a user-space implementation of WiFi stack and provides programming primitives to facilitate the development of deterministic communication scheduling algorithms.

Using this framework, scheduling algorithms will be developed to enforce end-to-end communication delay guarantees in dynamic environments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.