Enfold: Downclocking OFDM in Wi-Fi

Abstract

The link rate of popular wireless technologies, such as 802.11, has increased markedly over the past two decades: 802.11ac promises near-gigabit speeds in handset form factors. Yet only a small fraction of the devices outfitted with such radios actually make use of the full channel capacity and, even if they do, only do so sporadically. Hence many existing wireless devices frequently underutilize the channel, yet reap no particular benefits for doing so. In particular, neither transmission nor reception is power proportional in typical devices, even when the channel quality is sufficiently high to support far more energy-efficient modulations and encodings.