Reconsidering wireless systems with multiple radios

Abstract

The tremendous popularity of wireless systems in recent years has led to the commoditization of RF transceivers (radios) whose prices have fallen dramatically. The lower cost allows us to consider using two or more radios in the same device. Given this, we argue that wireless systems that use multiple radios in a collaborative manner dramatically improve system performance and functionality over the traditional single radio wireless systems that are popular today. In this context, we revisit some standard problems in wireless networking, including energy management, capacity enhancement, mobility management, channel failure recovery, and last-hop packet scheduling. We show that a systems approach can alleviate many of the performance and robustness issues prevalent in current wireless LAN systems. We explore the implications of the multi-radio approach on software and hardware design, as well as on algorithmic and protocol research issues. We identify three key design guidelines for constructing multi-radio systems and present results from two systems that we have built. Our experience supports our position that a multi-radio platform offers significant ben-efits for wireless systems.