WSN05-4: Medium Access Diversity with Uplink-Downlink Duality and Transmit Beamforming in Multiple-Antenna Wireless Networks

In a multiuser wireless system, multiuser diversity for opportunistic scheduling has been extensively studied for high-rate data transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol named medium access diversity with uplink-downlink duality and transmit beamforming (MAD-UDD/TB). In addition to aggressively utilizing multiuser gains, it takes advantage of uplink-downlink duality and transmit beamforming, which are the transmitting and receiving strategies used in a multiple antenna environment for simultaneous packet transmissions to multiple distinct users. These techniques effectively leverage the effect of multiuser diversity and greatly improve network throughput by taking into account the opportunistic scheduling among multiple users to prioritize data transmissions. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves much better performance than other medium access diversity and auto rate schemes with minimal additional overhead.