Abstract
Improvement of wireless networking performance heavily depends on new wireless PHY-layer designs, which use to require modifications on the wireless PHY hardware. Such hardware modifications, however, could be expensive or difficult over commodity wireless devices, and becomes the major barrier between lab prototypes and actual wireless systems in use. In this paper, we envision that most of wireless PHY operations could be represented as varying the wireless signal’s constellation point on the complex plane, and such new constellation points could be emulated from a commodity wireless MIMO device by mixing the multiple streams of its wireless signals in the air. Based on this insight, we design and implement StarLego, a wireless system that can produce custom wireless signals over commodity devices without hardware modification. StarLego is showcased by implementing a custom WiFi PHY preamble, and exhibits great promise to facilitate penetration of new wireless PHY techniques to existing wireless systems.
