Order matters: Transmission reordering in wireless networks

Modern wireless interfaces support a physical-layer capability called Message in Message (MIM). Briefly, MIM allows a receiver to disengage from an ongoing reception and engage onto a stronger incoming signal. Links that otherwise conflict with each other can be made concurrent with MIM. However, the concurrency is not immediate and can be achieved only if conflicting links begin transmission in a specific order. The importance of link order is new in wireless research, motivating MIM-aware revisions to link-scheduling protocols. This paper identifies the opportunity in MIM-aware reordering, characterizes the optimal improvement in throughput, and designs a link-layer protocol for enterprise wireless LANs to achieve it. Testbed and simulation results confirm the performance gains of the proposed system.