Controlled Interference Generation for Wireless Coexistence Research

In recent years, we have witnessed a proliferation of wireless technologies and devices operating in the unlicensed bands. The resulting escalation of wireless demand has put enor-mous pressure on available spectrum. This raises a unique set of communication challenges, notably co-existence, Cross Technology Interference (CTI), and fairness amidst high un-certainty and scarcity of interference-free channels. Conse-quently, there is a strong need for understanding and debug-ging the performance of existing wireless protocols and sys-tems under various patterns of interference. Therefore, we need to augment testbeds with tools that can enable repeat-able generation of realistic interference patterns. This would primarily facilitate wireless coexistence research experimen-tation. The heterogeneity of the existing wireless devices and protocols operating in the unlicensed bands makes in-terference hard to model. Meanwhile, researchers working on wireless coexistence generally use interference generated from various radio appliances. The lack of a systematic way of controlling these appliances makes it inconvenient to run experiments, particularly in remote testbeds. In this pa-per, we present a Controlled Interference Generator (CIG) framework for wireless networks. In the design of CIG, we consider a unified approach that incorporates a careful se-lection of interferer technologies (implemented in software), to expose networks to realistic interference patterns. We validate the resemblance of interference generated by CIG and interference from represented RF devices, by showing the accuracy in temporal and spectral domains