Coexistence-Aware Scheduling for Wireless System-on-a-Chip Devices
Lei Yang
Vinod Kone
Xue Yang
York Liu
Ben Y. Zhao
Haitao Zheng
Proceedings of The 7th IEEE Conference on Sensor, Mesh, and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2010)
[Full Text in PDF Format, 389KB]
Paper Abstract
Today's mobile devices support many wireless technologies to achieve
ubiquitous connectivity. Economic and energy constraints, however, are
driving 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 coexistence-aware
WiMAX scheduling policy that cooperates with WiFi links hosted by its
users without compromising its own transmission requirements. We derive
PACT's design using an analytical model of network competition, and
apply it to design practical WiMAX scheduling algorithms for various
traffic classes. We evaluate PACT using OPNET's realistic models for
WiFi and WiMAX. Using real network topologies, our experiment results
show that PACT significantly improves WiFi performance by up to 17 fold
without affecting the WiMAX user experience.