A control theoretic approach to achieve proportional fairness in 802.11e EDCA WLANs

This paper considers proportional fairness amongst ACs in an EDCA WLAN for provision of distinct QoS requirements and priority parameters. A detailed theoretical analysis is provided to derive the optimal station attempt probability which leads to a proportional fair allocation of station throughputs. The desirable fairness can be achieved using a centralised adaptive control approach. This approach is based on multivariable statespace control theory and uses the Linear Quadratic Integral (LQI) controller to periodically update CWmin till the optimal fair point of operation. Performance evaluation demonstrates that the control approach has high accuracy performance and fast convergence speed for general network scenarios. To our knowledge this might be the first time that a closed-loop control system is designed for EDCA WLANs to achieve proportional fairness

Tournament MAC with Constant Size Congestion Window for WLAN

In the context of radio distributed networks, we present a generalized approach for the Medium Access Control (MAC) with fixed congestion window. Our protocol is quite simple to analyze and can be used in a lot of different situations. We give mathematical evidence showing that our performance is tight, in the sense that no protocol with fixed congestion window can do better. We also place ourselves in the WiFi/WiMAX framework, and show experimental results enlightening collision reduction of 14% to 21% compared to the best known other methods. We show channel capacity improvement, and fairness considerations

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)

Near-Instantaneously Adaptive HSDPA-Style OFDM Versus MC-CDMA Transceivers for WIFI, WIMAX, and Next-Generation Cellular Systems

Burts-by-burst (BbB) adaptive high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) style multicarrier systems are reviewed, identifying their most critical design aspects. These systems exhibit numerous attractive features, rendering them eminently eligible for employment in next-generation wireless systems. It is argued that BbB-adaptive or symbol-by-symbol adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) modems counteract the near instantaneous channel quality variations and hence attain an increased throughput or robustness in comparison to their fixed-mode counterparts. Although they act quite differently, various diversity techniques, such as Rake receivers and space-time block coding (STBC) are also capable of mitigating the channel quality variations in their effort to reduce the bit error ratio (BER), provided that the individual antenna elements experience independent fading. By contrast, in the presence of correlated fading imposed by shadowing or time-variant multiuser interference, the benefits of space-time coding erode and it is unrealistic to expect that a fixed-mode space-time coded system remains capable of maintaining a near-constant BER

A fair access mechanism based on TXOP in IEEE 802.11e wireless networks

IEEE 802.11e is an extension of IEEE 802.11 that provides Quality of Service (QoS) for the applications with different service requirements. This standard makes use of several parameters such as contention window; inter frame space time and transmission opportunity to create service differentiation in the network. Transmission opportunity (TXOP), that is the focus point of this paper, is the time interval, during which a station is allowed to transmit packets without any contention. As the fixed amounts of TXOPs are allocated to different stations, unfairness appears in the network. And when users with different data rates exist, IEEE 802.11e WLANs face the lack of fairness in the network. Because the higher data rate stations transfer more data than the lower rate ones. Several mechanisms have been proposed to solve this problem by generating new TXOPs adaptive to the network's traffic condition. In this paper, some proposed mechanisms are evaluated and according to their evaluated strengths and weaknesses, a new mechanism is proposed for TXOP determination in IEEE 802.11e wireless networks. Our new algorithm considers data rate, channel error rate and data packet lengths to calculate adaptive TXOPs for the stations. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm leads to better fairness and also higher throughput and lower delays in the network.

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

Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment

Performance modelling and enhancement of wireless communication protocols

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks(WLANs) play a key role in the data communications and networking areas, having witnessed significant research and development. WLANs are extremely popular being almost everywhere including business,office and home deployments.In order to deal with the modem Wireless connectivity needs,the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) has developed the 802.11 standard family utilizing mainly radio transmission techniques, whereas the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) addressed the requirement for multipoint connectivity with the development of the Advanced Infrared(Alr) protocol stack. This work studies the collision avoidance procedures of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol and suggests certain protocol enhancements aiming at maximising performance. A new, elegant and accurate analysis based on Markov chain modelling is developed for the idealistic assumption of unlimited packet retransmissions as well as for the case of finite packet retry limits. Simple equations are derived for the through put efficiency, the average packet delay, the probability of a packet being discarded when it reaches the maximum retransmission limit, the average time to drop such a packet and the packet inter-arrival time for both basic access and RTS/CTS medium access schemes.The accuracy of the mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with OPNET simulation results. An extensive and detailed study is carried out on the influence of performance of physical layer, data rate, packet payload size and several backoff parameters for both medium access mechanisms. The previous mathematical model is extended to take into account transmission errors that can occur either independently with fixed Bit Error Rate(BER) or in bursts. The dependency of the protocol performance on BER and other factors related to independent and burst transmission errors is explored. Furthermore, a simple-implement appropriate tuning of the back off algorithm for maximizing IEEE 802-11 protocol performance is proposed depending on the specific communication requirements. The effectiveness of the RTS/CTS scheme in reducing collision duration at high data rates is studied and an all-purpose expression for the optimal use of the RTS/CTS reservation scheme is derived. Moreover, an easy-to-implement backoff algorithm that significantly enhances performance is introduced and an alternative derivation is developed based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi-dimensional Markov chains. Finally, an additional performance improvement scheme is proposed by employing packet bursting in order to reduce overhead costs such as contention time and RTS/CTSex changes. Fairness is explored in short-time and long-time scales for both the legacy DCF and packet bursting cases. AIr protocol employs the RTS/CTS medium reservation scheme to cope with hidden stations and CSMA/CA techniques with linear contention window (CW) adjustment for medium access. A 1-dimensional Markov chain model is constructed instead of the bi-dimensional model in order to obtain simple mathematical equations of the average packet delay.This new approach greatly simplifies previous analyses and can be applied to any CSMA/CA protocol.The derived mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with simulation results and an extensive Alr packet delay evaluation is carried out by taking into account all the factors and parameters that affect protocol performance. Finally, suitable values for both backoff and protocol parameters are proposed that reduce average packet delay and, thus, maximize performance