Realizing the benefits of user-level channel diversity

Channel or path diversity is known to improve performance in physical layer designs, channel access strategies, path switching mechanisms, etc. In this paper, we focus on "user-level" mechanisms that operate simply by distributing packet transmissions across multiple channels. We seek to understand when, why, and to what extent this can be of benefit, and equally important, whether these benefits can be realized with as little of an added cost as possible. In that context, our main contribution is not so much in identifying optimal policies for leveraging channel diversity, but in introducing the concept of channel "equivalence" and demonstrating that channel diversity yields substantial benefits mostly when channels are approximately equivalent. We build on this finding to investigate the robustness of these improvements against errors in the characterization of the available channels or changes in their characteristics. We also explore the sensitivity of the results as the number of available channels varies. The findings of the paper demonstrate that by allowing packet transmissions from multiple users to intelligently share channels, it is possible to improve overall performance and robustness through simple and portable user-level mechanisms.