Cooperative spatial scheduling in distributed MIMO MAC with interference/concurrency awareness

• Published in: MILCOM 2012 - 2012 IEEE Military Communications Conference pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Pengkai Zhao, You Lu, Daneshrad, B., Gerla, M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2012
• Subjects: Cooperative Scheduling; Decision support systems; Longest-Queue-First; Max-Min Throughput; Medium Access Control; Mercury (metals); Multi-Input Multi-Output; Reactive power; Tin
• ISBN: 1467317292; 9781467317290
• ISSN: 2155-7578; 2155-7586
• DOI: 10.1109/MILCOM.2012.6415728

Concurrent MIMO access is using MIMO-Beamforming vectors to mitigate interference on existing links and exploit spatial spectral opportunity. A novel distributed MIMO MAC, Net-Eigen MAC, was recently developed to (i) null interference on existing links, and (ii) maximize post-processing SNR within desired link, enjoying better throughput performance over conventional single link MAC or SPACEMAC (NullHoc). One key feature in Net-Eigen MAC, named as interference and concurrency awareness, can be utilized by network modules at MAC or higher layer as a powerful tool for network performance improvement. Inspired by such motivation, this paper will present a cooperative scheduling framework that closely utilizes the following two features in Net-Eigen MAC: (i) interference nulling on existing links; (ii) prioritized spatial concurrency among parallel links. Our design monitors all links' performance status, and accordingly schedules each time frame's prioritized concurrency/hierarchy, which naturally triggers two representative examples for practical applications: (i) max-min scheduling that optimizes fair throughput; and (ii) longest-queue-first scheduling that minimizes dropped packets. Extensive simulations show that our proposed design can help Net-Eigen MAC achieve a better performance than SPACEMAC or single link MAC in terms of throughput, delay, or loss ratio.