Service Characterizations for Multi-Hop Multiaccess Wireless Networks

The objective of a wireless multiaccess communication system is to distribute limited wireless channel resources efficiently and fairly among its users. Solutions for multiaccess communications have been approached with very different perspectives of the same problem, among them information-theoretic approaches at the physical layer, random access at the media access layer, and packet scheduling at the link or network layer. Different system models with sometimes incongruent assumptions make it difficult to compare or reconcile multiaccess solutions emerging from different areas. In this paper we address these difficulties by presenting system-theoretic characterizations of the available service in multiaccess networks for all three approaches. Using these characterizations we derive performance bounds of multiaccess systems that see bursty traffic. We take advantage of a recently proposed (min, x) network calculus, which enables the analysis of networks with time-variable traffic (in bits per second) in terms of the fading channels parameters, i.e., signal-to-noise ratio (in dB). For each of the multiaccess approaches considered, we are able to compute probabilistic performance bounds for multi-hop wireless channels. The numerical results shed light on fundamental tradeoffs offered by each of these approaches.
QC 20141209