Improving Wi-Fi Cooperative Broadcast With Fine-Grained Channel Estimation

Cooperative broadcast is an efficient approach to improve Wi-Fi broadcast performance in crowded scenarios with densely deployed access points (APs). However, existing concurrent transmission MAC protocols cannot perfectly synchronize APs for the receiving user, and the superimposed channels at users vary over time due to multi-path effects with different carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) from the APs. Traditional channel estimation methods, which treat the superimposed channels as a whole and use a portion of the superimposed channels to derive the rest, are unsuitable. To solve the problem, we propose a fine-grained channel estimation approach that first estimates channel taps and CFOs of each AP, and then reconstructs the superimposed channels. We first study a benchmark channel estimation algorithm that utilizes a widely adopted compressed sensing (CS) technique. However, through analysis and simulations, we show that the CS-based algorithm suffers from high correlation problems in the constructed sensing matrix and the non-sparse channel problem in practice, leading to an estimation error floor at high SNRs. To solve these problems, we present a two-stage channel estimation algorithm. It first estimates the CFOs by identifying the most likely CFO combination matching the received signals, and then estimates the time-domain channel taps. Simulation and experimental results show that the two-stage channel estimation algorithm achieves much lower bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER) than the traditional IEEE 802.11 approach, and the two-stage algorithm outperforms the CS-based algorithm, especially at high SNRs. The network-layer simulation results further demonstrate that, empowered by the proposed two-stage channel estimation algorithm, the cooperative broadcast scheme improves throughput by at least 1.4× (up to 46.8×) compared with the unicast-based broadcast schemes, and by approximately 0.6× to 0.8× compared with the simple uncooperative broadcast scheme.