Differentiated Service Support in Wireless Networks With Multibeam Antennas

Multibeam antenna arrays (MBAAs) have the capability to improve the capacity of a wireless network by facilitating simultaneous transmissions to multiple users. However, in practical deployments of wireless personal or local area networks (WPANs/WLANs) where piconet coordinators or access points (PNCs/APs) are deployed with MBAAs, it is quite likely to observe non-uniform node densities in various regions. To optimally utilize MBAAs in such scenarios, concurrent transmission scheduling in WPANs/WLANs is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. Then, a practical heuristic transmission scheduler that aims to maximize the number of concurrent communications by dynamically configuring the directions of beams is proposed. In addition, a service tag based fair scheduler is also proposed to achieve weighted fairness in WPANs/WLANs with MBAAs. Our results show that the performance improvements provided by the proposed heuristic scheduler are higher for antennas with lower beamwidths, and as the non-uniformity in the network increases, the traffic supported in the network increases in the range 24-41%, compared to the existing methods. The proposed service tag based scheduler can further improve the network throughput and achieve better fairness at the cost of a few beam direction reconfigurations, as compared to the existing methods and our heuristic scheduler.