Exploiting Spatial Reuse in Multi-Hop MIMO Networks: Models, Algorithms, and Evaluation

MIMO has great potential for enhancing the throughput of multi-hop wireless networks via spatial multiplexing or spatial reuse techniques. Spatial reuse outperforms spatial multiplexing in terms of potential network throughput and is effective in a wider range of wireless contexts than spatial multiplexing. The network throughput when previous approaches of spatial reuse are employed, however, is still considerably constrained due to the limited concurrency among the data streams transmitted in the same time slot and vicinity. In this paper, the authors address the issue of MIMO link scheduling to maximize the spatial reuse gain and thus network throughput.