18 research outputs found
Coexistence Mechanism for Colocated HDR/LDR WPANs Air Interfaces
This paper addresses the issues of interference management among Low Data Rate (LDR) and High Data Rate (HDR) WPAN air interfaces that are located in close-proximity (up to 10 cm) and eventually on the same multimode device. After showing the noticeable performance degradation in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and goodput due to the out-of-band interference of an HDR air interface over an LDR air interface, the paper presents a novel coexistence mechanism, named Alternating Wireless Activity (AWA), which is shown to greatly improve the performance in terms of goodput of the most interference vulnerable air interface (i.e., the LDR air interface). The main difference of the proposed mechanism with respect to other collaborative mechanisms based on time-scheduling is that it synchronizes the transmission of the LDR and HDR WPANs at the superframe level instead of packet level. Advantages and limitations of this choice are presented in the paper. Furthermore the functionalities of the AWA mechanism are positioned in a common protocol layer over the Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayers of the HDR and LDR devices and it can be used with any standard whose MAC is based on a superframe structure
CROSS-LAYER RESOURCE ALLOCATION SCHEME UNDER HETEROGENEOUS CONSTRAINTS FOR NEXT GENERATION HIGH RATE WPAN
International audienceIn the next generation wireless networks, the growing demand for new wireless applications is accompanied with high expectations for better quality of service (QoS) fulfillment especially for multimedia applications. Furthermore, the coexistence of future unlicensed users with existing licensed users is becoming a challenging task in next generation communication systems to overcome the underutilization of the spectrum. A QoS and interference aware resource allocation is thus of special interest in order to respond to the heterogeneous constraints of the next generation networks. In this work, we address the issue of resource allocation under heterogeneous constraints for unlicensed multi-band ultra-wideband (UWB) systems in the context of Future Home Networks, i.e. WPAN. The problem is first studied analytically using a heterogeneous constrained optimization problem formulation. After studying the characteristics of the optimal solution, we propose a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm based on a cross-layer approach that combines information provided by the PHY and MAC layers. While the PHY layer is responsible for providing the channel quality of the unlicensed UWB users as well as their interference power that they cause on licensed users, the MAC layer is responsible for classifying the unlicensed users using a two-class based approach that guarantees for multimedia services a high-priority level compared to other services. Combined in an efficient and simple way, the PHY and MAC information present the key elements of the aimed resource allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides a good tradeoff between the QoS satisfaction of the unlicensed applications with hard QoS requirements and the limitation of the interference affecting the licensed users
Performance Analysis of Distributed MAC Protocols for Wireless Networks
How to improve the radio resource utilization and provide better
quality-of-service (QoS) is an everlasting challenge to the
designers of wireless networks. As an indispensable element of
the solution to the above task, medium access control (MAC)
protocols coordinate the stations and resolve the channel access
contentions so that the scarce radio resources are shared fairly
and efficiently among the participating users. With a given
physical layer, a properly designed MAC protocol is the key to
desired system performance, and directly affects the perceived QoS
of end users.
Distributed random access protocols are widely used MAC protocols
in both infrastructure-based and infrastructureless wireless
networks. To understand the characteristics of these protocols,
there have been enormous efforts on their performance study by
means of analytical modeling in the literature. However, the
existing approaches are inflexible to adapt to different protocol
variants and traffic situations, due to either many unrealistic
assumptions or high complexity.
In this thesis, we propose a simple and scalable generic
performance analysis framework for a family of carrier sense
multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based
distributed MAC protocols, regardless of the detailed backoff and
channel access policies, with more realistic and fewer
assumptions. It provides a systematic approach to the performance
study and comparison of diverse MAC protocols in various
situations. Developed from the viewpoint of a tagged station, the
proposed framework focuses on modeling the backoff and channel
access behavior of an individual station. A set of fixed point
equations is obtained based on a novel three-level renewal process
concept, which leads to the fundamental MAC performance metric,
average frame service time. With this result, the important
network saturation throughput is then obtained straightforwardly.
The above distinctive approach makes the proposed analytical
framework unified for both saturated and unsaturated stations.
The proposed framework is successfully applied to study and
compare the performance of three representative distributed MAC
protocols: the legacy p-persistent CSMA/CA protocol, the IEEE
802.15.4 contention access period MAC protocol, and the IEEE
802.11 distributed coordination function, in a network with
homogeneous service. It is also extended naturally to study the
effects of three prevalent mechanisms for prioritized channel
access in a network with service differentiation. In particular,
the novel concepts of ``virtual backoff event'' and ``pre-backoff
waiting periods'' greatly simplify the analysis of the arbitration
interframe space mechanism, which is the most challenging one
among the three, as shown in the previous works reported in the
literature. The comparison with comprehensive simulations shows
that the proposed analytical framework provides accurate
performance predictions in a broad range of stations. The results
obtained provide many helpful insights into how to improve the
performance of current protocols and design better new ones
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
Design and Analysis of Medium Access Control Protocols for Broadband Wireless Networks
The next-generation wireless networks are expected to integrate diverse network architectures and various wireless access technologies to provide a robust solution for ubiquitous broadband wireless access, such as wireless local area networks (WLANs), Ultra-Wideband (UWB), and millimeter-wave (mmWave) based wireless personal area networks (WPANs), etc. To enhance the spectral efficiency and link reliability, smart antenna systems have been proposed as a promising candidate for future broadband access networks. To effectively exploit the increased capabilities of the emerging wireless networks, the different network characteristics and the underlying physical layer features need to be considered in the medium access control (MAC) design, which plays a critical role in providing efficient and fair resource sharing among multiple users.
In this thesis, we comprehensively investigate the MAC design in both single- and multi-hop broadband wireless networks, with and without infrastructure support. We first develop mathematical models to identify the performance bottlenecks and constraints in the design and operation of existing MAC. We then use a cross-layer approach to mitigate the identified bottleneck problems. Finally, by evaluating the performance of the proposed protocols with analytical models and extensive simulations, we determine the optimal protocol parameters to maximize the network performance.
In specific, a generic analytical framework is developed for capacity study of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN in support of non-persistent asymmetric traffic flows. The analysis can be applied for effective admission control to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) performance of multimedia applications. As the access point (AP) becomes the bottleneck in an infrastructure based WLAN, we explore the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) capability in the future IEEE 802.11n WLANs and propose a MIMO-aware multi-user (MU) MAC. By exploiting the multi-user degree of freedom in a MIMO system to allow the AP to communicate with multiple users in the downlink simultaneously, the proposed MU MAC can minimize the AP-bottleneck effect and significantly improve the network capacity. Other enhanced MAC mechanisms, e.g., frame aggregation and bidirectional transmissions, are also studied.
Furthermore, different from a narrowband system where simultaneous transmissions by nearby neighbors collide with each other, wideband system can support multiple concurrent transmissions if the multi-user interference can be properly managed. Taking advantage of the salient features of UWB and mmWave communications, we propose an exclusive region (ER) based MAC protocol to exploit the spatial multiplexing gain of centralized UWB and mmWave based wireless networks. Moreover, instead of studying the asymptotic capacity bounds of arbitrary networks which may be too loose to be useful in realistic networks, we derive the expected capacity or transport capacity of UWB and mmWave based networks with random topology. The analysis reveals the main factors affecting the network (transport) capacity, and how to determine the best protocol parameters to maximize the network capacity. In addition, due to limited transmission range, multi-hop relay is necessary to extend the communication coverage of UWB networks. A simple, scalable, and distributed UWB MAC protocol is crucial for efficiently utilizing the large bandwidth of UWB channels and enabling numerous new applications cost-effectively. To address this issue, we further design a distributed asynchronous ER based MAC for multi-hop UWB networks and derive the optimal ER size towards the maximum network throughput. The proposed MAC can significantly improve both network throughput and fairness performance, while the throughput and fairness are usually treated as a tradeoff in other MAC protocols
Performance investigation of a document retrieval system on a voice-data integrated token ring local area network
Lately, the interest in integration of voice and data on local computer networks has been on the rise. Subsequently, much research has been devoted to exploring various techniques that are implementable using the existing standards. This research has focused on the design issues in implementing a document retrieval system on a token ring network. The presence of voice and data traffic on the network complicates the protocol design further. The performance requirements of these traffic types are different. Voice creates stream traffic on a network, where as data traffic is bursty. Voice packets need to be delivered within a limited time interval, whereas the data emphasizes on error-free delivery. The necessity and the technological feasibility with off-the-shelf components has prompted this study. A possible solution is discussed in this dissertation;During the course of this research, due to the time consuming nature of simulation experiments, a need for efficient simulation techniques was felt. Thus, as a byproduct of the initial goal of protocol design, an approximate version of the regenerative simulation was developed and is discussed here in detail;Lastly, modeling difficulties encountered in forming an analytical model are listed and a performance analysis of the subsystems of interest is given
Performance evaluation of ECMA-368 medium access control protocol for UWB ad-hoc networks
Ultra Wideband (UWB) is an emerging technology for high rate, short range wireless communications.
Its unique features such as low power operation, robustness to multi-path
fading, and accurate positioning capabilities makes UWB a good platform for wireless
personal area networks (WPANs). One of the recent UWB standards standardized by
the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) International is the ECMA-
368, which defines the physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers for high
rate WPANs. The MAC protocol in ECMA-368 has a superframe structure. Each superframe
is divided into three different time periods. The beacon period is used for
control purposes. The distributed reserved protocol (DRP) period allows devices to reserve
bandwidth for data transmission. The PCA (prioritized contention access) period
supports contention-based access between different traffic classes.
In this thesis, we propose an analytical model to evaluate the performance of the
ECMA-368 MAC protocol. We assume that packets follow the Markovian Arrival Process
(MAP) and various service times can be modeled by different phase type distributions
(PHYs). We apply the Matrix Geometric Method (MGM) technique and model the
system as a MAP/PHY/1 queueing system. We derive the probability mass function (pmf) for the number of the packets in the queue, as well as the cumulative distribution
function (CDF) for the waiting time of the packets in the queue. The correctness of our
proposed analytical model is validated via simulations. We create the ECMA-368 module
by using the OPNET simulator. Analytical and simulation results are presented under
different scenariosScience, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat