A joint MIMO-OFDM transceiver and MAC design for mobile ad hoc networking

In this paper, we present a promising joint design of physical layer transceiver architecture and a medium access control (MAC) protocol for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) ad hoc networks. The receiver design is based on a new space-time interference cancelling technique for MIMO-OFDM ad hoc networks which suppresses co-channel interference and jammers, separates out multiple data streams, and minimizes inter-carrier interference (ICI). We take a cross layer approach to design the medium access control (MAC) protocol to fully exploit the advantages of the physical layer transceiver architecture. The MAC protocol is the recently developed medium access control protocol - mitigating interference using multiple antennas MAC (MIMA-MAC). It takes the advantage of the ability of MIMO-OFDM to demodulate multiple data streams to solve a key problem of 802.11-style MACs. Joint physical and higher layer simulations confirm that our joint design experiences good performance in terms of BER and MAC throughput and fairness.