MIMO routing with QoS provisioning

Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) transceivers can take advantage of random channel fading and multi-path delay spread for multiplying transfer rates (multiplexing gain), improve transmission quality/reliability (diversity gain) at no cost of extra spectrum, or allow the spatial separation of the signals of different transceivers in a multi-user scenario, thus providing a multiple-access gain. While multiple antenna techniques have been widely analyzed for single link transmission scenarios or from the medium access control (MAC) perspective, their usage and impact on network layer and more specifically their interaction with routing has not received much research attention. In this paper we investigate the interaction between multiple antenna techniques and routing. A novel routing scheme that exploits the multi-user gain capability of MIMO by controlling the number of ongoing transmission in order to increase the end-to-end throughput and guarantee the required quality-of-service (QoS) constraints is presented and analyzed.