On the Behavior of the Distributed Coordination Function of IEEE 802.11 with Multirate Capability under General Transmission Conditions

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, it presents a multi-dimensional Markovian state transition model characterizing the behavior of the IEEE 802.11 protocol at the Medium Access Control layer which accounts for packet transmission failures due to channel errors modeling both saturated and non-saturated traffic conditions. Second, it provides a throughput analysis of the IEEE 802.11 protocol at the data link layer in both saturated and non-saturated traffic conditions taking into account the impact of both the physical propagation channel and multirate transmission in Rayleigh fading environment. The general traffic model assumed is M/M/1/K. Finally, it shows that the behavior of the throughput in non-saturated traffic conditions is a linear combination of two system parameters; the payload size and the packet rates, $\lambda^{(s)}$, of each contending station. The validity interval of the proposed model is also derived. Simulation results closely match the theoretical derivations, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed models.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, October 21, 200

Intelligent and High-Performance Behavior Design of Autonomous Systems via Learning, Optimization and Control

Nowadays, great societal demands have rapidly boosted the development of autonomous systems that densely interact with humans in many application domains, from manufacturing to transportation and from workplaces to daily lives. The shift from isolated working environments to human-dominated space requires autonomous systems to be empowered to handle not only environmental uncertainties such as external vibrations but also interaction uncertainties arising from human behavior which is in nature probabilistic, causal but not strictly rational, internally hierarchical and socially compliant.This dissertation is concerned with the design of intelligent and high-performance behavior of such autonomous systems, leveraging the strength from control, optimization, learning, and cognitive science. The work consists of two parts. In Part I, the problem of high-level hybrid human-machine behavior design is addressed. The goal is to achieve safe, efficient and human-like interaction with people. A framework based on the theory of mind, utility theories and imitation learning is proposed to efficiently represent and learn the complicated behavior of humans. Built upon that, machine behaviors at three different levels - the perceptual level, the reasoning level, and the action level - are designed via imitation learning, optimization, and online adaptation, allowing the system to interpret, reason and behave as human, particularly when a variety of uncertainties exist. Applications to autonomous driving are considered throughout Part I. Part II is concerned with the design of high-performance low-level individual machine behavior in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. Advanced control laws based on adaptation, iterative learning and the internal structures of uncertainties/disturbances are developed to assure that the high-level interactive behaviors can be reliably executed. Applications on robot manipulators and high-precision motion systems are discussed in this part

Experimental and analytical evalution of embedded link performance with small-scale channel fluctuations

We have deployed a first-of-its-kind, urban-scale wireless mesh network which provides Internet access to 1000's of users spanning multiple square kilometers in an underserved area in Houston, TX. However, in this and other urban environments, IEEE 802.11 link performance is both misunderstood and poor-performing due to complex node interactions which are affected by a vast array of factors including topology, channel conditions, modulation rate, packet sizes, and physical layer capture. In this thesis, I draw from 100's of thousands of urban measurements and develop an analytical model to understand the performance of links embedded in the aforementioned complex scenarios. My focus is on two fundamental concepts involving embedded links. First, choosing the modulation rate which maximizes the throughput is imperative since each bit of the (overly-)shared medium is critical. Yet, all existing rate adaptation mechanisrns fail to track the ideal rate even in a simple, non-mobile urban scenario. Using a custom cross-layer framework, I implement multiple and previously un-implemented rate adaptation mechanisms to reveal the reasons for the failure and design rate adaptation mechanisms which are able to track urban and downtown vehicular and non-mobile environments. Second, I pose a basic, yet unsolved problem: given a time-varying channel and traffic matrix in the aforementioned complex scenario, predict the throughput of an embedded link and understand the complex interactions of factors that lead to its performance. By performing thousands of measurements of embedded links on an urban mesh network and developing an analytical model, this work is the first to show that even a 1 dB change in channel state can yield a bi-modal shift in throughput that emulates a change in node connectivity. Finally, I apply our model and experimentation to modulation rate selection and the interaction of control and data traffic to show that understanding these complex interdependencies leads to operation in improved performance regimes. My work has implications for this and other urban communities which have unequal access to Internet resources, enabling a high-speed access infrastructure at extremely low cost

Running Multiple Instances of the Distributed Coordination Function for Air-time Fairness in Multi-Rate WLANs

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Conventional multi-rate IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs (WLANs) are associated with the so-called performance anomaly to describe the phenomenon of high bit rate nodes being dragged down by slower nodes. This anomaly is known to be an impediment to obtaining high cumulative throughputs despite the employment of effective link adaptation mechanisms. To cope with the performance anomaly, air-time fairness has been proposed as an alternative to throughput fairness, the latter being a main characteristic of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). In this paper, we propose a novel distributed air-time fair MAC (Medium Access Control) without having to change the operation of the conventional DCF. In the proposed MAC, each node in the system runs multiple instances of the conventional DCF back-off algorithm where the number of DCF instances for the nodes can be chosen in a distributed manner. Both analytical and simulation-based results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed air-time fair MAC. © 2013 IEEE

Fine Scale Simulation of Fractured Reservoirs: Applications and Comparison

Imperial Users onl

Overlapped CDMA system in optical packet networks : resource allocation and performance evalutation

Dans cette thèse, la performance du système CDMA à chevauchement optique (OVCDMA) au niveau de la couche de contrôle d'accès au support (MAC) et l'allocation des ressources au niveau de la couche physique (PRY) sont étudiées. Notre but est d'apporter des améliorations pour des applications à débits multiples en répondant aux exigences de délai minimum tout en garantissant la qualité de service (QoS). Nous proposons de combiner les couches PRY et MAC par une nouvelle approche d'optimisation de performance qui consolide l'efficacité potentielle des réseaux optiques. Pour atteindre notre objectif, nous réalisons plusieurs étapes d'analyse. Tout d 'abord, nous suggérons le protocole S-ALOHA/OV-CDMA optique pour sa simplicité de contrôler les transmissions optiques au niveau de la couche liaison. Le débit du réseau, la latence de transmission et la stabilité du protocole sont ensuite évalués. L'évaluation prend en considération les caractéristiques physiques du système OY-CDMA, représentées par la probabilité de paquets bien reçus. Le système classique à traitement variable du gain (YPG) du CDMA, ciblé pour les applications à débits multiples, et le protocole MAC ±round-robin¿ récepteur/émetteur (R31), initialement proposé pour les réseaux par paquets en CDMA optique sont également pris en compte. L'objectif est d ' évaluer comparativement la performance du S-ALOHA/OY-CDMA en termes de l'immunité contre l'interférence d'accès lTIultiple (MAI) et les variations des charges du trafic. Les résultats montrent que les performances peuvent varier en ce qui concerne le choix du taux de transmission et la puissance de transmission optique au niveau de la couche PRY. Ainsi, nous proposons un schéma de répartition optimale des ressources pour allouer des taux de transmission à chevauchement optique et de puissance optique de transmission dans le système OY-CDMA comme des ressources devant être optimalement et équitablement réparties entre les utilisateurs qui sont regroupés dans des classes de différentes qualités de service. La condition d'optimalité est basée sur la maximisation de la capacité par utilisateur de la couche PHY. De ce fait, un choix optimal des ressources physiques est maintenant possible, mais il n'est pas équitable entre les classes. Par conséquent, pour améliorer la performance de la couche liaison tout en éliminant le problème d'absence d'équité, nous proposons comme une approche unifiée un schéma équitable et optimal pour l'allocation des ressources fondé sur la qualité de service pour des multiplexages temporels des réseaux par paquets en CDMA à chevauchement optique. Enfin, nous combinons cette dernière approche avec le protocole MAC dans un problème d'optimisation d'allocation équitable des ressources à contrainte de délai afin de mieux améliorer le débit du réseau et le délai au niveau de la couche liaison avec allocation équitable et optimale des ressources au niveau de la couche PHY

LINK ADAPTATION IN WIRELESS NETWORKS: A CROSS-LAYER APPROACH

Conventional Link Adaptation Techniques in wireless networks aim to overcome harsh link conditions caused by physical environmental properties, by adaptively regulating modulation, coding and other signal and protocol specific parameters. These techniques are essential for the overall performance of the networks, especially for environments where the ambient noise level is high or the noise level changes rapidly. Link adaptation techniques answer the questions of What to change? and When to change? in order to improve the present layer performance. Once these decisions are made, other layers are expected to function perfectly with the new communication channel conditions. In our work, we have shown that this assumption does not always hold; and provide two mechanisms that lessen the negative outcomes caused by these decisions. Our first solution, MORAL, is a MAC layer link adaptation technique which utilizes the physical transmission information in order to create differentiation between wireless users with different communication capabilities. MORAL passively collects information from its neighbors and re-aligns the MAC layer parameters according to the observed conditions. MORAL improves the fairness and total throughput of the system through distributing the mutually shared network assets to the wireless users in a fairer manner, according to their capabilities. Our second solution, Data Rate and Fragmentation Aware Ad-hoc Routing protocol, is a network layer link adaptation technique which utilizes the physical transmission information in order to differentiate the wireless links according to their communication capabilities. The proposed mechanism takes the physical transmission parameters into account during the path creation process and produces energy-efficient network paths. The research demonstrated in this dissertation contributes to our understanding of link adaptation techniques and broadens the scope of such techniques beyond simple, one-step physical parameter adjustments. We have designed and implemented two cross-layer mechanisms that utilize the physical layer information to better adapt to the varying channel conditions caused by physical link adaptation mechanisms. These mechanisms has shown that even though the Link Adaptation concept starts at the physical layer, its effects are by no means restricted to this layer; and the wireless networks can benefit considerably by expanding the scope of this concept throughout the entire network stack

Improving Multicast Communications Over Wireless Mesh Networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMNs) the traditional approach to shortest path tree based multicasting is to cater for the needs of the poorest performingnode i.e. the maximum permitted multicast line rate is limited to the lowest line rate used by the individual Child nodes on a branch. In general, this meansfixing the line rate to its minimum value and fixing the transmit power to its maximum permitted value. This simplistic approach of applying a single multicast rate for all nodes in the multicast group results in a sub-optimal trade-off between the mean network throughput and coverage area that does not allow for high bandwidth multimedia applications to be supported. By relaxing this constraint and allowing multiple line rates to be used, the mean network throughput can be improved. This thesis presents two methods that aim to increase the mean network throughput through the use of multiple line rates by the forwarding nodes. This is achieved by identifying the Child nodes responsible for reducing the multicast group rate. The first method identifies specific locations for the placement of relay nodes which allows for higher multicast branch line rates to be used. The second method uses a power control algorithm to tune the transmit power to allow for higher multicast branch line rates. The use of power control also helps to reduce the interference caused to neighbouring nodes.Through extensive computer simulation it can be shown that these two methods can lead to a four-fold gain in the mean network throughput undertypical WMN operating conditions compared with the single line rate case