AutoMAC: Rateless Wireless Concurrent Medium Access.

Current wireless network design is built on the ethos of avoiding interference. In this paper we question this long-held design principle. We show that with appropriate design, successful concurrent transmissions can be enabled and exploited on both the uplink and downlink. We show that this counterintuitive approach of encouraging interference can be exploited to increase network capacity significantly and simplify network design. We design and implement AutoMAC, a novel MAC and PHY protocol that exploits recently proposed rateless coding techniques to provide such concurrency. We show via a prototype implementation and experimental evaluation that AutoMAC can provide a 60% increase in network capacity on the uplink compared to traditional Wifi that does omniscient rate adaptation and a 35% median throughput gain on the downlink PHY layer as compared to an omniscient scheme that picks the best conventional bitrate [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]