Design and implementation of a MIMO MAC protocol for ad hoc networking

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) provides the potential for significant gains in channel capacity and spectral efficiency through its use of multiple element antenna systems and space-time coding. There are numerous published accounts of experimental MIMO communications links with high numbers of transmit and receive antennas, as well as commercial products exploiting MIMO with smaller antenna configurations. However, the use of MIMO as a modulation scheme for mobile ad hoc networking has so far only been explored as part of a theoretic or simulation exercise. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a MAC protocol for a MIMO system which is designed to exploit the capability of 8x10 MIMO for ad hoc networks. This work is unique in that from the start our design considered the specific capabilities and parameters of an existing 8x10 MIMO physical layer, including nonnegligible decoding delays, variable array size and coding schemes, as well as fixed frame sizes. Furthermore, given the bandwidths and antenna array sizes available, the physical layer design could achieve hundreds of megabits in link capacity, and our MAC protocol therefore needed to be designed and implemented in such a way as to maximize this capacity, particularly in a network multi-hop environment. Our MIMO-MAC protocol provides this capability while supporting multi-hop ad hoc networks through novel schemes for channel access, segmentation/reassembly, ARQ and link adaptation. This paper discusses the challenges and tradeoffs involved in developing a MAC for real MIMO hardware, and briefly describes a subset of our solutions to them.