Mobility in Wireless Networks: Puzzles and Opportunities
A. Proutiere (France Telecom / Ecole Normale Superieure)
In wireless communication networks, user mobility induces fading, which results in variations of the channel capacity between the transmitter and the receiver. For streaming applications (e.g. voice), fading has to be combatted to maintain a fixed transmission rate. For data applications that do not have stringent rate requirements, fading can be exploited to increase the network capacity. In this talk, we explore, using mathematical models, the various ways of achieving performance gains exploiting users’ mobility. We first present and analyze opportunistic scheduling, a known technique that aims at taking advantage of the rapid variations of channels (fast fading). Then we show that slow variations of channels can also be exploited by choosing appropriate scheduling algorithms and stress the benefits of implementing mobility-driven schedulers.