Fair Randomized Antenna Allocation in Asynchronous MIMO Multi-Hop Networks

Abstract—Previous work has shown that CSMA-based protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 can yield flow starvation in multihop wireless networks. While prior protocol designs alleviated such starvation by utilizing MIMO, they require global synchronization to temporally align transmissions and require perpacket distribution of the complete channel state information. In this paper, we experimentally show that MIMO networks based on pre-802.11n medium access, the state-of-the-art for asynchronous MIMO CSMA, worsen starvation as compared to SISO networks. Consequently, we design an asynchronous MIMO MAC protocol that counters starvation. We show that randomized and non-greedy antenna allocation coupled with local residual capacity estimation results in previously-starving nodes capturing a fair share of system resources while simultaneously exploiting throughput gains available to multi-antenna systems.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICCCN
• Authors: Ahmed Khattab, Ashutosh Sabharwal, Edward W. Knightly
• Keywords: Asynchronous Mimo, Asynchronous Mimo Csma, Asynchronous Mimo Mac, Communications, ICCCN 2008