On the Impact of MIMO Diversity on Higher Layer Performance

Abstract—In this paper, we shed light on the cross-layer interactions between the PHY, link and routing layers in networks with MIMO links operating in the diversity mode. Many previous studies assume an overly simplistic PHY layer model that does not sufficiently capture these interactions. We show that the use of simplistic models can in fact lead to misleading conclusions with regards to the higher layer performance with MIMO diversity. Towards understanding the impact of various PHY layer features on MIMO diversity, we begin with a simple but widely-used model and progressively incorporate these features to create new models. We examine the goodness of these models by comparing the simulated performance results with each, with measurements on an indoor 802.11n testbed. Our work reveals several interesting cross-layer dependencies that affect the gains due to MIMO diversity. In particular, we observe that relative to SISO links: (a) PHY layer gains due to MIMO diversity do not al...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Ece Gelal, Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Ioannis Broustis, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Saif K. Mohammed, Ananthanarayanan Chockalingam, Sneha Kumar Kasera
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2010, MIMO Diversity, PHY Layer, PHY Layer Features