Performance Improvement Of Mac Layer In Terms Of Reverse Direction Transmission Based On IEEE 802.11n

Medium access control (MAC) layer is one of the most prominent topics in the area of wireless networks. MAC protocols play a big role in improving the performance of wireless networks, and there are many challenges that have been addressed by the researchers to improve the performance of MAC layer in the family of IEEE 802.11. The physical data rate in IEEE 802.11n may reach 600 Mbps, this high data rate does not necessary transform into good performance efficiency, since the overhead at the MAC layer signifies that by augmenting PHY rates the effectiveness is automatically reduced. Therefore, the main objective of next generation wireless local area networks (WLANs) IEEE 802.11n is to achieve high throughput and able to support some applications such as TCP 100 Mbps and HDTV 20 Mbps and less delay. To mitigate the overhead and increase the MAC efficiency for IEEE 802.11n, one of the key enhancements at MAC layer in IEEE 802.11n is a reverse direction transmission. Reverse direction transmission mainly aims to accurately exchange the data between two devices, and does not support error recovery and correction; it drops the entire erroneous frame even though only a single bit error exists in the frame and then causes a retransmission overhead. Thus, two new schemes called (RD-SFF) Reverse Direction Single Frame Fragmentation and (RD-MFF) Reverse Direction Multi Frame Fragmentation are proposed in this study. The RD-SFF role is to aggregate the packets only into large frame, while RD-MFF aggregate both packets and frames into larger frame, then divided each data frame in both directions into subframes, Then it sends each subframe over reverse direction transmission. During the transmission, only the corrupted subframes need to be retransmited if an error occured, instead of the whole frame. Fragmentation method is also examined whereby the packets which are longer when compared to a threshold are split into fragments prior to being combined. The system is examined by simulation using NS-2. The simulation results show that the RD-SFF scheme significantly improves the performance over reverse direction transmission with single data frame up to 100%. In addition, the RD-MFF scheme improvers the performance over reverse direction transmission with multi data frames up to 44% based on network condition. These results show the benefits of fragmentation method in retransmission overhead and erroneous transmission. The results obtained by ON/OFF scheme takes into account the channel condition to show the benefits of our adaptive scheme in both ideal as well as erroneous networks. In conclusion, this research has achieved its stated objective of mitigation the overhead and increase the MAC efficiency for IEEE 802.11n. Additionally, the proposed schemes show a significant improvement over the reverse direction in changing network conditions to the current network state

Low energy indoor network : deployment optimisation

This article considers what the minimum energy indoor access point deployment is in order to achieve a certain downlink quality-of-service. The article investigates two conventional multiple-access technologies, namely: LTE-femtocells and 802.11n Wi-Fi. This is done in a dynamic multi-user and multi-cell interference network. Our baseline results are reinforced by novel theoretical expressions. Furthermore, the work underlines the importance of considering optimisation when accounting for the capacity saturation of realistic modulation and coding schemes. The results in this article show that optimising the location of access points both within a building and within the individual rooms is critical to minimise the energy consumption

Improving Performance for CSMA/CA Based Wireless Networks

Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) based wireless networks are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. With the aim of supporting rich multimedia applications such as high-definition television (HDTV, 20Mbps) and DVD (9.8Mbps), one of the technology trends is towards increasingly higher bandwidth. Some recent IEEE 802.11n proposals seek to provide PHY rates of up to 600 Mbps. In addition to increasing bandwidth, there is also strong interest in extending the coverage of CSMA/CA based wireless networks. One solution is to relay traffic via multiple intermediate stations if the sender and the receiver are far apart. The so called “mesh” networks based on this relay-based approach, if properly designed, may feature both “high speed” and “large coverage” at the same time. This thesis focusses on MAC layer performance enhancements in CSMA/CA based networks in this context. Firstly, we observe that higher PHY rates do not necessarily translate into corresponding increases in MAC layer throughput due to the overhead of the CSMA/CA based MAC/PHY layers. To mitigate the overhead, we propose a novel MAC scheme whereby transported information is partially acknowledged and retransmitted. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations show that the proposed MAC approach can achieve high efficiency (low MAC overhead) for a wide range of channel variations and realistic traffic types. Secondly, we investigate the close interaction between the MAC layer and the buffer above it to improve performance for real world traffic such as TCP. Surprisingly, the issue of buffer sizing in 802.11 wireless networks has received little attention in the literature yet it poses fundamentally new challenges compared to buffer sizing in wired networks. We propose a new adaptive buffer sizing approach for 802.11e WLANs that maintains a high level of link utilisation, while minimising queueing delay. Thirdly, we highlight that gross unfairness can exist between competing flows in multihop mesh networks even if we assume that orthogonal channels are used in neighbouring hops. That is, even without inter-channel interference and hidden terminals, multi-hop mesh networks which aim to offer a both “high speed” and “large coverage” are not achieved. We propose the use of 802.11e’s TXOP mechanism to restore/enfore fairness. The proposed approach is implementable using off-the-shelf devices and fully decentralised (requires no message passing)

Cross-layer based erasure code to reduce the 802.11 performance anomaly : when FEC meets ARF

Wireless networks have been widely accepted and deployed in our world nowadays. Consumers are now accustomed to wireless connectivity in their daily life due to the pervasive- ness of the 802.11b/g and wireless LAN standards. Specially, the emergence of the next evolution of Wi-Fi technology known as 802.11n is pushing a new revolution on personal wireless communication. However, in the context of WLAN, although multiple novel wireless access technologies have been proposed and developed to offer high bandwidth and guarantee quality of transmission, some deficiencies still remain due to the original design of WLAN-MAC layer. In particular, the performance anomaly of 802.11 is a serious issue which induces a potentially dramatic reduction of the global bandwidth when one or several mobile nodes downgrade their transmission rates following the signal degradation. In this paper, we study how the use of adaptive erasure code as a replacement of the Auto Rate Feedback mechanism can help to mitigate this performance anomaly issue. Preliminary study shows a global increase of the goodput delivered to mobile hosts attached to an access point

Experimental Performance Evaluation and Frame Aggregation Enhancement in IEEE 802.11n WLANs

The IEEE 802.11n standard promises to extend today’s most popular WLAN standard by significantly increasing reach, reliability, and throughput. Ratified on September 2009, this standard defines many new physical and medium access control (MAC) layer enhancements. These enhancements aim to provide a data transmission rate of up to 600 Mbps. Since June 2007, 802.11n products are available on the enterprise market based on the draft 2.0. In this paper we investigate the effect of most of the proposed 802.11n MAC and physical layer features on the adhoc networks performance. We have performed several experiments in real conditions. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of 802.11n enhancement. We have also examined the interoperability and fairness of 802.11n. The frame aggregation mechanism of 802.11n MAC layer can improve the efficiency of channel utilization by reducing the protocol overheads. We focused on the effect of frame aggregation on the support of voice and video applications in wireless networks. We also propose a new frame aggregation scheduler that considers specific QoS requirements for multimedia applications. We dynamically adjust the aggregated frame size based on frame's access category defined in 802.11e standard

Aggregation with fragment retransmission for very high-speed WLANs

In upcoming very high-speed WLANs the physical layer (PHY) rate may reach 600 Mbps. To achieve high efficiency at the medium access control (MAC) layer, we identify fundamental properties that must be satisfied by any CSMA/CA based MAC layer and develop a novel scheme called Aggregation with Fragment Retransmission (AFR). In the AFR scheme, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame. If errors happen during the transmission, only the corrupted fragments of the large frame are retransmitted. An analytic model is developed to evaluate the throughput and delay performance of AFR over a noisy channel, and to compare AFR with competing schemes in the literature. Optimal frame and fragment sizes are calculated using this model. Transmission delays are minimised by using a zero-waiting mechanism where frames are transmitted immediately once the MAC wins a transmission opportunity. We prove that zero waiting can achieve maximum throughput. As a complement to the theoretical analysis, we investigate by simulations the impact of AFR on the performance of realistic application traffic with diverse requirements. We have implemented the AFR scheme in the NS-2 simulator and present detailed results for TCP, VoIP and HDTV traffic. The AFR scheme described was developed as part of the 802.11n working group work. The analysis presented here is general enough to be extended to the proposed scheme in the upcoming 802.11n standard. Trends indicated by our simulation results should extend to any well-designed aggregation scheme

Buffer Sizing for 802.11 Based Networks

We consider the sizing of network buffers in 802.11 based networks. Wireless networks face a number of fundamental issues that do not arise in wired networks. We demonstrate that the use of fixed size buffers in 802.11 networks inevitably leads to either undesirable channel under-utilization or unnecessary high delays. We present two novel dynamic buffer sizing algorithms that achieve high throughput while maintaining low delay across a wide range of network conditions. Experimental measurements demonstrate the utility of the proposed algorithms in a production WLAN and a lab testbed.Comment: 14 pages, to appear on IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networkin