AirShare: Distributed coherent transmission made seamless

Abstract

Distributed coherent transmission is necessary for a variety of high-gain communication protocols such as distributed MIMO and creating codes over the air. Unfortunately, however, distributed coherent transmission is intrinsically difficult because different nodes are driven by independent clocks, which do not have the exact same frequency. This causes the nodes to have frequency offsets relative to each other, and hence their transmissions fail to combine coherently over the air. This paper presents AirShare, a primitive that makes distributed coherent transmission seamless. AirShare transmits a shared clock on the air and feeds it to the wireless nodes as a reference clock, hence eliminating the root cause for incoherent transmissions. The paper addresses the challenges in designing and delivering such a shared clock. It also implements AirShare in a network of USRP software radios, and demonstrates that it achieves tight phase coherence. Further, to illustrate AirShare's versatility, the paper uses it to deliver a coherent-radio abstraction on top of which it demonstrates two cooperative protocols: distributed MIMO, and distributed rate adaptation.