Sub-GHz LPWAN network coexistence, management and virtualization : an overview and open research challenges

The IoT domain is characterized by many applications that require low-bandwidth communications over a long range, at a low cost and at low power. Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) fulfill these requirements by using sub-GHz radio frequencies (typically 433 or 868 MHz) with typical transmission ranges in the order of 1 up to 50 km. As a result, a single base station can cover large areas and can support high numbers of connected devices (> 1000 per base station). Notorious initiatives in this domain are LoRa, Sigfox and the upcoming IEEE 802.11ah (or "HaLow") standard. Although these new technologies have the potential to significantly impact many IoT deployments, the current market is very fragmented and many challenges exists related to deployment, scalability, management and coexistence aspects, making adoption of these technologies difficult for many companies. To remedy this, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to improve the performance of LPWAN networks through in-network optimization, cross-technology coexistence and cooperation and virtualization of management functions. In addition, the paper gives an overview of state of the art solutions and identifies open challenges for each of these aspects

Belaidžio ryšio tinklų terpės prieigos valdymo tyrimas

Over the years, consumer requirements for Quality of Service (QoS) has been growing exponentially. Recently, the ratification process of newly IEEE 802.11ad amendment to IEEE 802.11 was finished. The IEEE 802.11ad is the newly con-sumer wireless communication approach, which will gain high spot on the 5G evolution. Major players in wireless market, such as Qualcomm already are inte-grating solutions from unlicensed band, like IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ad into their architecture of LTE PRO (the next evolutionary step for 5G networking) (Qualcomm 2013; Parker et al. 2015). As the demand is growing both in enter-prise wireless networking and home consumer markets. Consumers started to no-tice the performance degradation due to overcrowded unlicensed bands. The un-licensed bands such as 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz are widely used for up-to-date IEEE 802.11n/ac technologies with upcoming IEEE 802.11ax. However, overusage of the available frequency leads to severe interference issue and consequences in to-tal system performance degradation, currently existing wireless medium access method can not sustain the increasing intereference and thus wireless needs a new methods of wireless medium access. The main focal point of this dissertation is to improve wireless performance in dense wireless networks. In dissertation both the conceptual and multi-band wireless medium access methods are considered both from theoretical point of view and experimental usage. The introduction chapter presents the investigated problem and it’s objects of research as well as importance of dissertation and it’s scientific novelty in the unlicensed wireless field. Chapter 1 revises used literature. Existing and up-to-date state-of-the-art so-lution are reviewed, evaluated and key point advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. Conclusions are drawn at the end of the chapter. Chapter 2 describes theoretical analysis of wireless medium access protocols and the new wireless medium access method. During analysis theoretical simula-tions are performed. Conclusions are drawn at the end of the chapter. Chapter 3 is focused on the experimental components evaluation for multi-band system, which would be in line with theoretical concept investigations. The experimental results, showed that components of multi-band system can gain sig-nificant performance increase when compared to the existing IEEE 802.11n/ac wireless systems. General conclusions are drawn after analysis of measurement results

Experimental assessment of the effects of cross-traffic on Wi-Fi video streaming

Wi-Fi networks are the first and sometimes only choice for the video streaming in homes, airports, malls, public areas and museums. However, Wi-Fi networks are vulnerable to interference, noise and have bandwidth limitations. Due to the intrinsic vulnerability of the communication channel, and the large number of variables involved, simulation alone is not enough in the evaluation of the performance of wireless networks. Actually, there is a tendency to give experimental tests a central role in the assessment of Wi-Fi networks performance. The paper presents an experimental analysis of the effects of cross traffic on the performance of video streaming over Wi-Fi, based on cross-layer measurements. Experiments are carried out in a semi-anechoic chamber, to prevent the results from being influenced by external factors. The experimental results permit to analyze the influence of cross traffic characteristics on cross layer measures and objective video quality metrics evaluated through a standardized approach

Contributions to QoS and energy efficiency in wi-fi networks

The Wi-Fi technology has been in the recent years fostering the proliferation of attractive mobile computing devices with broadband capabilities. Current Wi-Fi radios though severely impact the battery duration of these devices thus limiting their potential applications. In this thesis we present a set of contributions that address the challenge of increasing energy efficiency in Wi-Fi networks. In particular, we consider the problem of how to optimize the trade-off between performance and energy effciency in a wide variety of use cases and applications. In this context, we introduce novel energy effcient algorithms for real-time and data applications, for distributed and centralized Wi-Fi QoS and power saving protocols and for Wi-Fi stations and Access Points. In addition, the di¿erent algorithms presented in this thesis adhere to the following design guidelines: i) they are implemented entirely at layer two, and can hence be easily re-used in any device with a Wi-Fi interface, ii) they do not require modi¿cations to current 802.11 standards, and can hence be readily deployed in existing Wi-Fi devices, and iii) whenever possible they favor client side solutions, and hence mobile computing devices implementing them can benefit from an increased energy efficiency regardless of the Access Point they connect to. Each of our proposed algorithms is thoroughly evaluated by means of both theoretical analysis and packet level simulations. Thus, the contributions presented in this thesis provide a realistic set of tools to improve energy efficiency in current Wi-Fi networks

Towards Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era: Recent Advances, Current Issues and Future Directions

Tactile Internet (TI) is envisioned to create a paradigm shift from the content-oriented communications to steer/control-based communications by enabling real-time transmission of haptic information (i.e., touch, actuation, motion, vibration, surface texture) over Internet in addition to the conventional audiovisual and data traffics. This emerging TI technology, also considered as the next evolution phase of Internet of Things (IoT), is expected to create numerous opportunities for technology markets in a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperation systems and Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to automotive safety and eHealthcare towards addressing the complex problems of human society. However, the realization of TI over wireless media in the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond networks creates various non-conventional communication challenges and stringent requirements in terms of ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high data-rate connectivity, resource allocation, multiple access and quality-latency-rate tradeoff. To this end, this paper aims to provide a holistic view on wireless TI along with a thorough review of the existing state-of-the-art, to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to highlight potential solutions and to propose future research directions. First, starting with the vision of TI and recent advances and a review of related survey/overview articles, we present a generalized framework for wireless TI in the Beyond 5G Era including a TI architecture, the main technical requirements, the key application areas and potential enabling technologies. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing TI works by broadly categorizing them into three main paradigms; namely, haptic communications, wireless AR/VR, and autonomous, intelligent and cooperative mobility systems. Next, potential enabling technologies across physical/Medium Access Control (MAC) and network layers are identified and discussed in detail. Also, security and privacy issues of TI applications are discussed along with some promising enablers. Finally, we present some open research challenges and recommend promising future research directions

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State of the art and Research Directions

The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communication and allow skill set delivery over networks. Some examples of potential applications are tele-surgery, vehicle fleets, augmented reality and industrial process automation. Several papers already cover many of the Tactile Internet-related concepts and technologies, such as haptic codecs, applications, and supporting technologies. However, none of them offers a comprehensive survey of the Tactile Internet, including its architectures and algorithms. Furthermore, none of them provides a systematic and critical review of the existing solutions. To address these lacunae, we provide a comprehensive survey of the architectures and algorithms proposed to date for the Tactile Internet. In addition, we critically review them using a well-defined set of requirements and discuss some of the lessons learned as well as the most promising research directions

Design of rate-adaptive MAC and medium aware routing protocols for multi-rate, multi-hop wireless networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The IEEE 802.11 standard conformant wireless communication stations have multi-rate transmission capability. To achieve greater communication efficiency, multi-rate capable stations use rateadaptation to select appropriate transmission rate according to variations in the channel quality. The thesis presents two rate-adaptation schemes, each belonging to one of the two classes of rateadaptation schemes i.e.(1) the frame-transmission statistics based schemes, and (2) Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) based, closed loop schemes. The SNR-based rate-adaptation scheme, proposed in this thesis uses a novel mechanism of delivering a receiver’s feedback to a transmitter; without requiring any modification in the standard frames as suggested by existing research. The frame-transmissionstatistics based rate adaptation solution uses an on-demand incremental strategy for selecting a rate-selection threshold. This solution is based on a cross-layer communication framework, where the rate-adaptation module uses information to/from the Application layer along with relevant information from the Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer. The proposed solutions are highly responsive when compared with existing rate-adaptation schemes; responsiveness is one of the key factors in the design of such protocols. The novel feedback mechanism makes it possible to achieve frame-loss differentiation with just three frames, avoiding the use of Request To Send/ Clear To Send (RTS/CTS) frames and further delays in this process. Performance tests have affirmed that the proposed rate-adaptation schemes are energy efficient; with efficiency up to 19% in specific test scenarios. In terms of throughput and frame loss-differentiation mechanisms, the proposed schemes have shown significantly better performance.Routing protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) use broadcast frames during the route discovery process. The 802.11 mandates the use of different transmission rates for broadcast and unicast (data-) frames. In many cases it causes creation of communication gray zones, where stations which are marked as ‘reachable neighbours’ using the broadcast frames (using lower transmission rate) are not accessible during normal, unicast communication (mainly at a higher rate). Similarly, higher device density, interference and mobility cause variable medium access delays. The IEEE 802.11e introduces four different MAC level queues for four access categories, maintaining service priority within the queues; which implies that frames from a higher priority queue are serviced more frequently than those belonging to lower priority queues. Such an enhancement at the MAC sub-layer introduces uneven queuing delays. Conventional routing protocols are unaware of such MAC specific constraints and as a result these factors are not considered which result in severe performance deterioration. To meet such challenges, the thesis presents a medium aware distance vector (MADV) routing protocol for MANETs. MADV uses MAC and physical layer (PHY) specific information in the route metric and maintains a separate route per-AC-per-destination in its routing tables. The MADV-metric can be incorporated into various routing rotocols and its applicability is determined by the possibility of provision of MAC dependent arameters that are used to determine the hop-by-hop MADV-metric values. Simulation tests and omparison with existing MANET protocols demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating the medium dependent parameters and show that MADV is significantly better in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput