Signal propagation delay has traditionally been ignored or treated as an adverse factor in wireless communications. Our recent work shows it can be exploited as a new dimension for scheduling media access and can significantly improve network throughput. We derived an explicit characterization of the scheduling rate region with propagation delays and studied the continuity properties of the region.
With increasingly high bandwidths, physical-layer frame lengths shorter than typical propagation delays are becoming feasible, opening a new playground for future wireless network design.