Reconsidering wireless systems with multiple radios

ABSTRACT

The tremendous popularity of wireless systems in recent years has led to the commoditization of RF transceivers (radios) whose prices have fallen dramatically. The lower cost allows us to consider using two or more radios in the same device. Given this, we argue that wireless systems that use multiple radios in a collaborative manner dramatically improve system performance and functionality over the traditional single radio wireless systems that are popular today. In this context, we revisit some standard problems in wireless networking, including energy management, capacity enhancement, mobility management, channel failure recovery, and last-hop packet scheduling. We show that a systems approach can alleviate many of the performance and robustness issues prevalent in current wireless LAN systems. We explore the implications of the multi-radio approach on software and hardware design, as well as on algorithmic and protocol research issues. We identify three key design guidelines for constructing multi-radio systems and present results from two systems that we have built. Our experience supports our position that a multi-radio platform offers significant ben-efits for wireless systems.

REFERENCES

• 1: Atul Adya , Paramvir Bahl , Jitendra Padhye , Alec Wolman , Lidong Zhou, A Multi-Radio Unification Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Broadband Networks (BROADNETS'04), p.344-354, October 25-29, 2004 [doi>10.1109/BROADNETS.2004.8]
• 2: Hari Balakrishnan , Srinivasan Seshan , Randy H. Katz, Improving reliable transport and handoff performance in cellular wireless networks, Wireless Networks, v.1 n.4, p.469-481, 1995 [doi>10.1007/BF01985757]
• 3: N. Bambos and J. M. Rulnick. Mobile Power Management for Maximum Battery Life in a Wireless Communications Network. In IEEE INFOCOM, March 1996.
• 4: F. C. Commission. FCC 02-48: Revision of Part 15 of the Commission's rules regarding Ultra-Wideband transmission systems. http://www.uwb.org/files/new/FCC_RandO.pdf, April 2002.
• 5: A. Communications. Three WLAN Standards in a Single Solution - The AR50001X Combo WLAN Solution. http://www.atheros.com/pt/ar5001X.html, 2004.
• 6: Douglas S. J. De Couto , Daniel Aguayo , John Bicket , Robert Morris, A high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing, Proceedings of the 9th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 14-19, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/938985.939000]
• 7: Richard Draves , Jitendra Padhye , Brian Zill, Routing in multi-radio, multi-hop wireless mesh networks, Proceedings of the 10th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 26-October 01, 2004, Philadelphia, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/1023720.1023732]
• 8: L. M. Feeney and M. Nilsson. Investigating the Energy Consumption of a Wireless Network Interface in an Ad Hoc Networking Environment. In IEEE INFOCOM, 2001.
• 9: J. A. Guitierrez et al. IEEE 802.15.4: A Developing Standard for Low-Power Low-Cost Wireless Personal Area Networks. In IEEE Network Magazine, September 2001.
• 10: Hung-Yun Hsieh , Raghupathy Sivakumar, A transport layer approach for achieving aggregate bandwidths on multi-homed mobile hosts, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570656]
• 11: IEEE. IEEE 802.1x-2001 IEEE Standards for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks: Port-Based Network Access Control, 1999.
• 12: IEEE802.11b/D3.0. Wireless LAN Medium Access Control(MAC) and Physical (PHY) Layer Specification: High Speed Physical Layer Extensions in the 2.4 GHz Band, 1999.
• 13: D. B. Johnson and D. A. Maltz. Dynamic source routing in ad-hoc wireless networks. In T. Imielinski and H. Korth, editors, Mobile Computing. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
• 14: Ronny Krashinsky , Hari Balakrishnan, Minimizing energy for wireless web access with bounded slowdown, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570660]
• 15: Thyagarajan Nandagopal , Songwu Lu , Vaduvur Bharghavan, A unified architecture for the design and evaluation of wireless fair queueing algorithms, Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.132-142, August 15-19, 1999, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/313451.313520]
• 16: E. Ng, I. Stoica, and H. Zhang. Packet Fair Queueing Algorithms for Wireless Networks with Location-Dependent Errors. In INFOCOM, March 1998.
• 17: L. Nord and J. Haartsen. The Bluetooth Radio Specification and The Bluetooth Baseband Specification. Bluetooth, 1999--2000.
• 18: H. Packard. HP iPAQ h6315 Pocket PC - Phone Edition. http://www.shopping.hp.com, 2004.
• 19: Ramón Cáceres , Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Fast and scalable wireless handoffs in supports of mobile Internet audio, Mobile Networks and Applications, v.3 n.4, p.351-363, 1999 [doi>10.1023/A:1019149404614]
• 20: R. A. Powers. Batteries for Low Power Electronics. In Proceedings of the IEEE 83(4), April 1995.
• 21: J. Rabaey et al. PicoRadios for Wireless Sensor Networks: The Next Challenge in Ultra-Low-Power Design. In Proceedings of the ISSCC, February 2002.
• 22: Parameswaran Ramanathan , Prathima Agrawal, Adapting packet fair queueing algorithms to wireless networks, Proceedings of the 4th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.1-9, October 25-30, 1998, Dallas, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/288235.288239]
• 23: RF Monolithics. TR1000/TR1100 916.50 MHz Hybrid Transceivers. http://www.rfm.com.
• 24: C. E. Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communications. Bell System Technical Journal, 27:379--423 and 623--656, July and October 1948.
• 25: Eugene Shih , Paramvir Bahl , Michael J. Sinclair, Wake on wireless:: an event driven energy saving strategy for battery operated devices, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570666]
• 26: Suresh Singh , C. S. Raghavendra, PAMAS—power aware multi-access protocol with signalling for ad hoc networks, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.28 n.3, p.5-26, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/293927.293928]
• 27: The Network Simulator: NS-2. http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns.