Picasso: Flexible RF and Spectrum Slicing

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of Picasso, a novel radio design that allows simultaneous transmission and reception on separate and arbitrary spectrum fragments using a single RF front end and antenna. Picasso leverages this capability to flexibly partition fragmented spectrum into multiple slices that share the RF front end and antenna, yet operate concurrent and independent PHY/MAC protocols. The authors show how this capability provides a general and clean abstraction to exploit fragmented spectrum in Wi-Fi networks and handle coexistence in dense deployments.