Multihop Diversity in Wideband OFDM Systems: The Impact of Spatial Reuse and Frequency Selectivity

The goal of this paper is to establish which practical routing schemes for wireless networks are most suitable for wideband systems in the power-limited regime, which is, for example, a practically relevant mode of operation for the analysis of ultrawideband (UWB) mesh networks. For this purpose, we study the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency (known as the power-bandwidth tradeoff) in a wideband linear multihop network in which transmissions employ orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and are affected by quasi-static, frequency-selective fading. Considering open-loop (fixed-rate) and closed-loop (rate-adaptive) multihop relaying techniques, we characterize the impact of routing with spatial reuse on the statistical properties of the end-to-end conditional mutual information (conditioned on the specific values of the channel fading parameters and therefore treated as a random variable) and on the energy and spectral efficiency measures of the wideband regime. Our analysis particularly deals with the convergence of these end-to-end performance measures in the case of large number of hops, i.e., the phenomenon first observed in \cite{Oyman06b} and named as ``multihop diversity''. Our results demonstrate the realizability of the multihop diversity advantages in the case of routing with spatial reuse for wideband OFDM systems under wireless channel effects such as path-loss and quasi-static frequency-selective multipath fading.Comment: 6 pages, to be published in Proc. 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications (IEEE ISSSTA'08), Bologna, Ital

Identifying Design Requirements for Wireless Routing Link Metrics

In this paper, we identify and analyze the requirements to design a new routing link metric for wireless multihop networks. Considering these requirements, when a link metric is proposed, then both the design and implementation of the link metric with a routing protocol become easy. Secondly, the underlying network issues can easily be tackled. Thirdly, an appreciable performance of the network is guaranteed. Along with the existing implementation of three link metrics Expected Transmission Count (ETX), Minimum Delay (MD), and Minimum Loss (ML), we implement inverse ETX; invETX with Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) using NS-2.34. The simulation results show that how the computational burden of a metric degrades the performance of the respective protocol and how a metric has to trade-off between different performance parameters

Concave Switching in Single and Multihop Networks

Switched queueing networks model wireless networks, input queued switches and numerous other networked communications systems. For single-hop networks, we consider a {($\alpha,g$)-switch policy} which combines the MaxWeight policies with bandwidth sharing networks -- a further well studied model of Internet congestion. We prove the maximum stability property for this class of randomized policies. Thus these policies have the same first order behavior as the MaxWeight policies. However, for multihop networks some of these generalized polices address a number of critical weakness of the MaxWeight/BackPressure policies. For multihop networks with fixed routing, we consider the Proportional Scheduler (or (1,log)-policy). In this setting, the BackPressure policy is maximum stable, but must maintain a queue for every route-destination, which typically grows rapidly with a network's size. However, this proportionally fair policy only needs to maintain a queue for each outgoing link, which is typically bounded in number. As is common with Internet routing, by maintaining per-link queueing each node only needs to know the next hop for each packet and not its entire route. Further, in contrast to BackPressure, the Proportional Scheduler does not compare downstream queue lengths to determine weights, only local link information is required. This leads to greater potential for decomposed implementations of the policy. Through a reduction argument and an entropy argument, we demonstrate that, whilst maintaining substantially less queueing overhead, the Proportional Scheduler achieves maximum throughput stability.Comment: 28 page