Coexistence-Aware Scheduling for Wireless System-on-a-Chip Devices

Abstract--Today's mobile devices support many wireless technologies to achieve ubiquitous connectivity. Economic and energy constraints, however, drive the industry to implement multiple technologies into a single radio. This system-on-a-chip architecture leads to competition among networks when devices toggle across different technologies to communicate with multiple networks. In this paper, we study the impact of such network competition using a representative scenario where devices split their time between WiMAX and WiFi connections. We show that competition with WiMAX significantly lowers WiFi's throughput, but this performance degradation is largely unnecessary, and can be attributed to the fact that WiMAX's transmission scheduling does not consider competing networks. We propose PACT, a new competition-friendly WiMAX scheduling policy that cooperates with WiFi links hosted by its users without compromising its own transmission requirements. We derive PACT's de...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SECON
• Authors: Lei Yang, Vinod Kone, Xue Yang, York Liu, Ben Y. Zhao, Haitao Zheng
• Keywords: Communications, Network Competition, SECON 2010, WiFi, WiMAX