Cross-layer design of MIMO-enabled WLANs with network utility maximization

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) have become a ubiquitous high-speed data-access technology. The recent IEEE 802.11e standard provides quality-of-service (QoS) support, and the pending 802.11n standard further increases the transmission rate by using the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technique. Multiple antennas can be used to improve the performance gain by either increasing the transmission reliability through spatial diversity or increasing the transmission rate through spatial multiplexing. This new characteristic at the wireless physical (PHY) layer requires the corresponding adaptation at the medium access control (MAC) layer to reach the best performance gain. In this paper, we propose cross-layer design schemes for WLANs under two different MAC protocols: the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA)-based 802.11e MAC and the slotted Aloha MAC. For the 802.11e MAC, two different contention window (CW) size adaptation schemes, namely, U-MAC and D-MAC, are proposed, which facilitate the MAC protocol to jointly adapt its CW size with the PHY layer's MIMO operating parameters. For the slotted Aloha MAC, a cross-layer optimization framework NUM-O is proposed to jointly optimize the MIMO configuration at the PHY layer and the persistent probabilities for different classes of multimedia traffic at the MAC layer. A distributed algorithm NUM-D based on dual decomposition and a simplified version NUM-S are also proposed. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Index Terms--Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), network utility maximization (NUM), optimization, slotted Aloha, wireless local area networks (WLANs), 802.11e.