Cross-Layer Adaptation with Coordinated Scheduling for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

A novel adaptive scheduling with coordination for the performance improvement of delay-sensitive applications over heterogeneous wireless networks is proposed. It can bring such contributes i) adaptation capabilities at different layers of the protocol stack, and ii) the coordinated scheduling initiation procedure. It uses information from the physical layer and data link layer to determine the appropriate transmission power level and media encoding rate for a connection, or initialize coordinated scheduling. The main contribution of this paper is the integration of the coordinated scheduling initiation into cross-layer mechanism adopting adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and automatic repeat request (ARQ) to improve the overall system performance. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed design achieves significantly improved performance in terms of packet loss rate, average delay, and throughput, as well as an increased system capacity.