A Programmable MAC Based System for Real-time and Non Real-time Flows in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless networks are increasingly being used to serve both real-time and non real-time flows. The former includes applications such as VoIP and video streaming, while the latter includes applications like file transfer and web browsing. These flows have very different service requirements. On the one hand, real-time flows usually require a strict per-packet delay bound, since late packets may not be useful to the application. On the other hand, non real-time flows do not pose any stringent delay requisites and only demand high throughput.

Serving flows that have heterogeneous requirements necessitates the deployment of algorithms and rules for resource allocation that attempt to satisfy these needs. However, existing hardware does not allow such reconfigurability and is limited to providing a once-size-fits all solution. The objective of this work is to design, develop and demonstrate an architecture, specifically for software reconfigured hardware at the PHY-MAC layers that can provide such functionality at a per-flow and per-packet level, and to illustrate its superior performance to conventionally deployed solutions.