208 research outputs found
Is Our Model for Contention Resolution Wrong?
Randomized binary exponential backoff (BEB) is a popular algorithm for
coordinating access to a shared channel. With an operational history exceeding
four decades, BEB is currently an important component of several wireless
standards. Despite this track record, prior theoretical results indicate that
under bursty traffic (1) BEB yields poor makespan and (2) superior algorithms
are possible. To date, the degree to which these findings manifest in practice
has not been resolved.
To address this issue, we examine one of the strongest cases against BEB:
packets that simultaneously begin contending for the wireless channel. Using
Network Simulator 3, we compare against more recent algorithms that are
inspired by BEB, but whose makespan guarantees are superior. Surprisingly, we
discover that these newer algorithms significantly underperform. Through
further investigation, we identify as the culprit a flawed but common
abstraction regarding the cost of collisions. Our experimental results are
complemented by analytical arguments that the number of collisions -- and not
solely makespan -- is an important metric to optimize. We believe that these
findings have implications for the design of contention-resolution algorithms.Comment: Accepted to the 29th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and
Architectures (SPAA 2017
Analysis and enhancement of wireless LANs in noisy channels
Without a doubt, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) technology has been encountering an explosive growth lately. IEEE 802.11 is the standard associated with this promising technology, which enures shared access to the wireless medium through the distributed coordination function (DCF). Recently, the IEEE 802.11e task group has made extensions to WLANs medium access control (MAC) in order to support quality of service (QoS) traffic. An inherited problem for WLANs, is the volatility of the propagation medium, which is a challenging issue that affects the system performance significantly. Consequently, enhancing the operation of the DCF in noisy environments is of great interest, and has attracted the attention of many researchers. Our first major contribution in the presented thesis, is an analytical and simulation analysis for the binary exponential backoff (BEB) scheme of the DCF, in the presence of channel noise. We show that following the BEB procedure when a host encounters erroneous transmission is needed only if the channel was highly loaded. However, incrementing the contention window (CW) upon each packet failure, whether caused by instantaneous transmission (i.e. collision) or channel noise, will result in the waste of air time if the channel was lightly loaded. Accordingly, we present a hybrid access method that adapts the CW according to the channel load along with the frame error rate (FER). Other means to overcome the channel noise is the adjustment of the transmission rate. Many rate adaptation (RA) algorithms were introduced in the past few years, including the Automatic Rate Fallback (ARF) which is currently implemented in the wireless cards. Yet, many drawbacks are associated with these RA algorithms; specifically, in regard to the techniques and events that should trigger the rate change. Moreover, the IEEE 802.11e QoS flows requirements were not considered with the latter schemes. Accordingly, our next major contribution in this work is the presentation of a novel rate adaptation scheme. The simplicity of the introduced rate adaptation scheme is that it relies on the MAC layer parameters rather than those of the PHY layer when adjusting the rate. Furthermore, our algorithm supports the IEEE 802.11e MAC extensions where QoS traffic requirements were integrated in the procedure of adjusting the bit rate. Hence, strict real-time flow parameters such as delay and maximum drop rate are respected. Finally, we enhance the dynamic assignment of transmission opportunities (TXOPs) in order to offer fair air-time for nodes facing high packet loss rat
Smart Sensing and Performance Analysis for Cognitive Radio Networks
Static spectrum access policy has resulted in spectrum scarcity as well as low spectrum utility in today\u27s wireless communications. To utilize the limited spectrum more efficiently, cognitive radio networks have been considered a promising paradigm for future network. Due to the unique features of cognitive radio technology, cognitive radio networks not only raise new challenges, but also bring several fundamental problems back to the focus of researchers. So far, a number of problems in cognitive radio networks have remained unsolved over the past decade. The work presented in this dissertation attempts to fill some of the gaps in the research area of cognitive radio networks. It focuses primarily on spectrum sensing and performance analysis in two architectures: a single cognitive radio network and multiple co-existing cognitive radio networks. Firstly, a single cognitive radio network with one primary user is considered. A weighted cooperative spectrum sensing framework is designed, to increase the spectrum sensing accuracy. After studying the architecture of a single cognitive radio network, attention is shifted to co-existing multiple cognitive radio networks. The weakness of the conventional two-state sensing model is pointed out in this architecture. To solve the problem, a smart sensing model which consists of three states is designed. Accordingly, a method for a two-stage detection procedure is developed to accurately detect each state of the three. In the first stage, energy detection is employed to identify whether a channel is idle or occupied. If the channel is occupied, received signal is further analyzed at the second stage to determine whether the signal originates from a primary user or an secondary user. For the second stage, a statistical model is developed, which is used for distance estimation. The false alarm and miss detection probabilities for the spectrum sensing technology are theoretically analyzed. Then, how to use smart sensing, coupled with a designed media access control protocol, to achieve fairness among multiple CRNs is thoroughly investigated. The media access control protocol fully takes the PU activity into account. Afterwards, the significant performance metrics including throughput and fairness are carefully studied. In terms of fairness, the fairness dynamics from a micro-level to macro-level is evaluated among secondary users from multiple cognitive radio networks. The fundamental distinctions between the two-state model and the three-state sensing model are also addressed. Lastly, the delay performance of a cognitive radio network supporting heterogeneous traffic is examined. Various delay requirements over the packets from secondary users are fully considered. Specifically, the packets from secondary users are classified into either delay-sensitive packets or delay-insensitive packets. Moreover, a novel relative priority strategy is designed between these two types of traffic by proposing a transmission window strategy. The delay performance of both a single-primary user scenario and a multiple-primary user scenario is thoroughly investigated by employing queueing theory
A measurement-based approach to service modeling and bandwidth estimation in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks
[no abstract
MAC regenerative analysis of wireless Ad-Hoc networks
Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de
Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de
Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em
Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresThe IEEE 802.11 is a fast growing technology all over the world. This growth is essentially due to the increasing number of users in the network. Despite the increasing number of users, not all of them need the same quality of service. Thus, service differentiation is an important aspect that shall be considered in mathematical models that describe network performance. Moreover, users typically communicate using point-to-point connections(unicast transmission scheme) and point-to-multipoint connections (broadcast transmission scheme). The co-existence of unicast and broadcast traffic impacts the network performance and its importance cannot be neglected in the network performance evaluation. This motivates the work presented in this thesis, which characterizes the network accounting for these important parameters.
This thesis formulates a model to describe the behavior of the medium access control used in IEEE 802.11-based networks. This is the first step to develop a model that considers both different groups of users configured with different medium access control parameters and the co-existence of two different transmission schemes (unicast and broadcast).
The model also assumes a finite number of retransmissions for unicast packets and it is
confirmed that several models already proposed in other works are especial cases of the proposed model.
Finally, a theoretical validation of the model is done as well as some simulations to assess its accuracy and, some realistic network features are discussed
Medium Access Control Protocols for Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks: A Survey
Studies of ad hoc wireless networks are a relatively new field gaining more popularity for various new applications. In these networks, the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are responsible for coordinating the access from active nodes. These protocols are of significant importance since the wireless communication channel is inherently prone to errors and unique problems such as the hidden-terminal problem, the exposed-terminal problem, and signal fading effects. Although a lot of research has been conducted on MAC protocols, the various issues involved have mostly been presented in isolation of each other. We therefore make an attempt to present a comprehensive survey of major schemes, integrating various related issues and challenges with a view to providing a big-picture outlook to this vast area. We present a classification of MAC protocols and their brief description, based on their operating principles and underlying features. In conclusion, we present a brief summary of key ideas and a general direction for future work
Design, Modeling, and Analysis for MAC Protocols in Ultra-wideband Networks
Ultra-wideband (UWB) is an appealing transmission technology for
short-range, bandwidth demanded wireless communications. With the
data rate of several hundred megabits per second, UWB demonstrates
great potential in supporting multimedia streams such as
high-definition television (HDTV), voice over Internet Protocol
(VoIP), and console gaming in office or home networks, known as the
wireless personal area network (WPAN). While vast research effort
has been made on the physical layer issues of UWB, the corresponding
medium access control (MAC) protocols that exploit UWB technology
have not been well developed.
Given an extremely wide bandwidth of UWB, a fundamental problem on
how to manage multiple users to efficiently utilize the bandwidth is
a MAC design issue. Without explicitly considering the physical
properties of UWB, existing MAC protocols are not optimized for
UWB-based networks. In addition, the limited processing capability
of UWB devices poses challenges to the design of low-complexity MAC
protocols. In this thesis, we comprehensively investigate the MAC
protocols for UWB networks. The objective is to link the physical
characteristics of UWB with the MAC protocols to fully exploit its
advantage. We consider two themes: centralized and distributed UWB
networks.
For centralized networks, the most critical issue surrounding the
MAC protocol is the resource allocation with fairness and quality of
service (QoS) provisioning. We address this issue by breaking down
into two scenarios: homogeneous and heterogeneous network
configurations. In the homogeneous case, users have the same
bandwidth requirement, and the objective of resource allocation is
to maximize the network throughput. In the heterogeneous case, users
have different bandwidth requirements, and the objective of resource
allocation is to provide differentiated services. For both design
objectives, the optimal scheduling problem is NP-hard. Our
contributions lie in the development of low-complexity scheduling
algorithms that fully exploit the characteristics of UWB.
For distributed networks, the MAC becomes node-based problems,
rather than link-based problems as in centralized networks. Each
node either contends for channel access or reserves transmission
opportunity through negotiation. We investigate two representative
protocols that have been adopted in the WiMedia specification for
future UWB-based WPANs. One is a contention-based protocol called
prioritized channel access (PCA), which employs the same mechanisms
as the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) in IEEE 802.11e
for providing differentiated services. The other is a
reservation-based protocol called distributed reservation protocol
(DRP), which allows time slots to be reserved in a distributed
manner. Our goal is to identify the capabilities of these two
protocols in supporting multimedia applications for UWB networks. To
achieve this, we develop analytical models and conduct detailed
analysis for respective protocols. The proposed analytical models
have several merits. They are accurate and provide close-form
expressions with low computational effort. Through a cross-layer
approach, our analytical models can capture the near-realistic
protocol behaviors, thus useful insights into the protocol can be
obtained to improve or fine-tune the protocol operations. The
proposed models can also be readily extended to incorporate more
sophisticated considerations, which should benefit future UWB
network design
Coordination and Interference in 802.11 Networks: Inference, Analysis and Mitigation
In the last decade, 802.11 wireless devices data-rates have increased by three orders of magnitude, while communications experiencing low throughput are still largely present. Such throughput loss is a fundamental problem of wireless networking that is difficult to diagnose and amend. My research addresses two key causes of throughput loss: MAC layer protocol overhead and destructive link interference. First, I design WiFi-Nano reducing the channel access overhead by an order of magnitude leveraging an innovative speculative technique to transmit preambles. This new concept is based on simultaneous preamble transmission and detection via a self-interference cancellation design, and paves the way to the realization of the collision detection paradigm in wireless networks. Next, I propose 802.11ec (Encoded Control), the first 802.11-based protocol that eliminates the overhead of control packets. Instead, 802.11ec coordinates node transmissions via a set of predefined pseudo-noise codewords, resulting in the dramatic increase of throughput and communication robustness. Finally, I design MIDAS, a model-driven network management tool that alleviates low throughput wireless links identifying key corrective actions. MIDAS' key contribution is to reveal the fundamental role of node transmission coordination in characterizing destructive interference. I implement WiFi-Nano, 802.11ec, and MIDAS using a combination of WARP FPGA-based radio boards, custom emulation platforms, and network simulators. The results obtained show that WiFi-Nano increases the network throughput by up to 100%, 802.11ec improves network access fairness by up to 90%, and MIDAS identifies corrective actions with a prediction error as low as 20%
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