Performance Analysis of Multichannel Radio Link Control in MIMO Systems

Abstract

With rapid advances in wireless communications, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas technology has been integrated into next-generation wireless communication standards. In this paper, we introduce a MIMO system model, propose a multichannel radio link control protocol and a dynamic channel scheduling policy. We then conduct a performance study on the multichannel link control protocol with two different scheduling policies (i.e., dynamic and static scheduling) using simulations. Simulation results show that the dynamic scheduling outperforms the static scheduling. It is observed that the average packet delay with the dynamic scheduling increases with the average error rate of parallel channels, but decreases with the variance in the error rates of parallel channels. More interestingly, the number of parallel channels has only an insignificant impact on the average packet delay, when the dynamic scheduling is applied in MIMO systems, from which we confirm that the use of parallel channels is a favorable option for packet data networking in the point of view of the link-layer performance.