Fair Randomized Antenna Allocation in Asynchronous MIMO Multi-Hop Networks

Previous work has shown that CSMA-based protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 can yield flow starvation in multihop wireless networks. While prior protocol designs alleviated such starvation by utilizing MIMO, they require global synchronization to temporally align transmissions and require perpacket distribution of the complete channel state information. In this paper, the authors experimentally show that MIMO networks based on pre-802.11n medium access, the state-of-the-art for asynchronous MIMO CSMA, worsen starvation as compared to SISO networks.