Analyzing the impact of medium access control protocol design and control-plane uplink in asymmetric RF/OWC networks with RF congestion

Abstract

As the demand for wireless capacity continues to grow, highly directional wireless communication technologies have the potential to provide massive gains in area spectral efficiency. However, novel challenges arise when considering bidirectional connectivity and multi-cell/multi-user systems with highly directional links. Some of these challenges can be alleviated with the introduction of asymmetric connectivity where the highly directional links are used solely for downlink transmission. As an example, we consider asymmetric links with an optical wireless communication (OWC) downlink and sub-6 GHz RF uplink. More specifically, we consider visible light communication as an instance of OWC, although the presented analysis and validation are applicable to alternative OWC technologies and other simplex downlink transmission technologies. While asymmetric connectivity has been previously demonstrated in scenarios like this, the impact of control-plane asymmetry has not been explored, to our knowledge. In this paper, we first introduce the novel challenges related to local handshaking in wireless networks with control-plane asymmetry. We then develop a theoretical framework for throughput analysis in a network where the sub-6 GHz RF channel is shared between a conventional RF link and an asymmetric RF/OWC link. This analysis is validated via simulation and verified in a testbed system using Mango WARP3 software defined radios and a commercially available RF access point. Finally, we use the derived throughput equations to analyze the impact of various protocol parameters and demonstrate one potential use of the derived equations to evaluate sum throughput in the presence of an unreliable OWC link.