Joint MAC / PHY Scheduling

Who gets to use radio spectrum, and when, where, and how?

Wireless communication poses a challenge to the clean separation of functional layers. This is especially true of the PHY / MAC boundary: The physical layer, broadly speaking, is about how devices communicate over some medium, and the MAC layer is concerned with which devices do so when.

Fundamentally, MAC is about arbitrating conflict¹, but the physical layer defines what kind of conflict exists in the first place. Interesting cross-layer problems occur because many physical layer decisions mitigate some conflicts while exacerbating others and the best MAC decisions depend on those conflicts. The essence of MAC / PHY integration is using higher-layer information to help the PHY determine which conflicts are most worth avoiding.

STDMA Scheduling with Directional Antennas

• Eric Anderson, Caleb Phillips, Douglas Sicker, Dirk Grunwald, Optimization Decomposition for Scheduling and System Configuration in Wireless Networks, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking, 2014. (BibTeX).
• Eric Anderson, Caleb Phillips, Douglas Sicker, Dirk Grunwald, Signal Quality Pricing: Decomposition for Spectrum Scheduling and System Configuration, IEEE DySPAN, 2011. (BibTeX) slides.
• Eric W. Anderson, Integrated Scheduling and Beam Steering for Spatial Reuse, PhD thesis, University of Colorado, 2010. (BibTeX).
• Eric W. Anderson, Optimal Scheduling and Antenna Configuration, MobiSys PhD forum, extended abstract., 2010. (BibTeX).
• Eric Anderson, Integrated Beam Steering and Scheduling for Spatial Reuse, Extended abstract. HotMobile, 2009. (BibTeX) Poster (ppt).

Adaptive MAC Scheduling

• Michael Buettner, Gary Yee, Eric Anderson, Richard Han, X-MAC: A short-preamble MAC protocol for duty-cycled wireless sensor network, SenSys, 2006. (BibTeX).