TCCI: taming co-channel interference for wireless lans

Co-channel interference is a fundamental issue in wireless local area networks (WLANs). Although many results have been developed to handle co-channel interference for concurrent transmission, most of them require network-wide fine-grained synchronization and data sharing among access points (APs). Such luxuries, however, are not affordable in many WLANs due to their hardware limitation and data privacy concern. In this paper, we present TCCI, a co-channel interference management scheme to enable concurrent transmission in WLANs. TCCI requires neither network-wide fine-grained synchronization nor inter-network data sharing, and therefore is amenable to real-world implementation. The enabler of TCCI is a new detection and beamforming method for an AP, which is capable of taming unknown interference by leveraging its multiple antennas. We have built a prototype of TCCI on a wireless testbed and demonstrated its compatibility with commercial Atheros 802.11 devices. Our experimental results show that TCCI allows co-located APs to serve their users simultaneously and achieves up to 113% throughput gain compared to existing interference-avoidance protocol.