Traffic improvements in wireless communication networks using antenna arrays

Abstract

A wireless network with beamforming capabilities at the receiver is considered that allows two or more transmitters to share the same channel to communicate with the base station. A novel approach is introduced, which combines the effects of the digital signal processing (adaptive beamforming) at the physical layer with the traffic policies at the network layer on the overall queuing model of a cell. The effect of signal processing on the queuing model of the cell is represented by a parameter in the final cell model. Each cell is modeled by a multiuser/multiserver service facility, where each server is a beamformed channel formed by the cell's base station. From this effective cell model, we find the closed form solutions for blocking probabilities of the calls and total carried traffic in a wireless network with adaptive arrays. Our analytical as well as numerical results show that adaptive beamforming at the receiver reduces the blocking probability of the calls and increases the total carried traffic in the system.