Study on Intermittent WLAN Consisting of Heterogeneous Multi-radio Devices

It is envisioned that multiple radios may be integrated into a single portable device in the near future. Such multi-radio devices may participate in multiple networks at the same time. In this paper, we consider a 802.11 WLAN network that shares a common set of multi-radio devices with another network, say CO-NETWORK, and we discuss WiMAX as one example of CONETWORK. One multi-radio device may not actively operate in WLAN when the same device is transmitting or receiving in the CO-NETWORK. As such, two networks interact with each other via shared multi-radio devices; and scheduling in CO-NETWORK may affect the performance of WLAN. In this paper, we study how the fairness/throughput of a WLAN network may be affected by the scheduling of CO-NETWORK. We further propose some scheduling optimization criteria for CO-NETWORK to minimize such impact. Simulation and analytical results are provided to support our discussions.