IRDB: Towards enjoying spatial, rate, and beam‐channel diversity in wireless networks for multimedia applications

Abstract

This work studies the problems of routing, beam‐channel selection, space/time division multiple accessing, and admission control for multi‐rate wireless networks equipped with directional antennas. The spatial diversity obtained by directional antennas enables neighboring nodes to use a same physical wireless channel simultaneously. On‐demand multimedia flows are considered, where each accepted multimedia request develops a bandwidth‐guaranteed tree. We propose a cross‐layer algorithm, named “interference and rate‐aware directional broadcasting (IRDB),” to efficiently improve the resource allocation in the network. In order to build the routing tree, the proposed algorithm jointly uses all three spatial, channel, and rate diversities. We also introduce an efficient interference‐ and rate‐aware metric for covering more neighboring nodes at the highest possible rate. As an advantage, it not only reduces the resource consumption, but also decreases interference. IRDB greedily schedules a new admitted session without re‐routing or violating the quality of service constraints of current sessions. Numerical results show that the proposed IRDB scheme achieves improved performance in terms of occupied time slots and call acceptance rate.