Future Evolution of CSMA Protocols for the IEEE 802.11 Standard

In this paper a candidate protocol to replace the prevalent CSMA/CA medium access control in Wireless Local Area Networks is presented. The proposed protocol can achieve higher throughput than CSMA/CA, while maintaining fairness, and without additional implementation complexity. Under certain circumstances, it is able to reach and maintain collision-free operation, even when the number of contenders is variable and potentially large. It is backward compatible, allowing for new and legacy stations to coexist without degrading one another's performance, a property that can make the adoption process by future versions of the standard smooth and inexpensive.Comment: This paper has been accepted in the Second IEEE ICC Workshop 2013 on Telecommunication Standards: From Research to Standard

Random Access Game and Medium Access Control Design

Motivated partially by a control-theoretic viewpoint, we propose a game-theoretic model, called random access game, for contention control. We characterize Nash equilibria of random access games, study their dynamics, and propose distributed algorithms (strategy evolutions) to achieve Nash equilibria. This provides a general analytical framework that is capable of modeling a large class of system-wide quality-of-service (QoS) models via the specification of per-node utility functions, in which system-wide fairness or service differentiation can be achieved in a distributed manner as long as each node executes a contention resolution algorithm that is designed to achieve the Nash equilibrium. We thus propose a novel medium access method derived from carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) according to distributed strategy update mechanism achieving the Nash equilibrium of random access game. We present a concrete medium access method that adapts to a continuous contention measure called conditional collision probability, stabilizes the network into a steady state that achieves optimal throughput with targeted fairness (or service differentiation), and can decouple contention control from handling failed transmissions. In addition to guiding medium access control design, the random access game model also provides an analytical framework to understand equilibrium and dynamic properties of different medium access protocols

On the Computational Power of Radio Channels

Radio networks can be a challenging platform for which to develop distributed algorithms, because the network nodes must contend for a shared channel. In some cases, though, the shared medium is an advantage rather than a disadvantage: for example, many radio network algorithms cleverly use the shared channel to approximate the degree of a node, or estimate the contention. In this paper we ask how far the inherent power of a shared radio channel goes, and whether it can efficiently compute "classicaly hard" functions such as Majority, Approximate Sum, and Parity. Using techniques from circuit complexity, we show that in many cases, the answer is "no". We show that simple radio channels, such as the beeping model or the channel with collision-detection, can be approximated by a low-degree polynomial, which makes them subject to known lower bounds on functions such as Parity and Majority; we obtain round lower bounds of the form Omega(n^{delta}) on these functions, for delta in (0,1). Next, we use the technique of random restrictions, used to prove AC^0 lower bounds, to prove a tight lower bound of Omega(1/epsilon^2) on computing a (1 +/- epsilon)-approximation to the sum of the nodes\u27 inputs. Our techniques are general, and apply to many types of radio channels studied in the literature

Design of State-based Schedulers for a Network of Control Loops

For a closed-loop system, which has a contention-based multiple access network on its sensor link, the Medium Access Controller (MAC) may discard some packets when the traffic on the link is high. We use a local state-based scheduler to select a few critical data packets to send to the MAC. In this paper, we analyze the impact of such a scheduler on the closed-loop system in the presence of traffic, and show that there is a dual effect with state-based scheduling. In general, this makes the optimal scheduler and controller hard to find. However, by removing past controls from the scheduling criterion, we find that certainty equivalence holds. This condition is related to the classical result of Bar-Shalom and Tse, and it leads to the design of a scheduler with a certainty equivalent controller. This design, however, does not result in an equivalent system to the original problem, in the sense of Witsenhausen. Computing the estimate is difficult, but can be simplified by introducing a symmetry constraint on the scheduler. Based on these findings, we propose a dual predictor architecture for the closed-loop system, which ensures separation between scheduler, observer and controller. We present an example of this architecture, which illustrates a network-aware event-triggering mechanism.Comment: 17 pages, technical repor

RCFD: A Novel Channel Access Scheme for Full-Duplex Wireless Networks Based on Contention in Time and Frequency Domains

In the last years, the advancements in signal processing and integrated circuits technology allowed several research groups to develop working prototypes of in-band full-duplex wireless systems. The introduction of such a revolutionary concept is promising in terms of increasing network performance, but at the same time poses several new challenges, especially at the MAC layer. Consequently, innovative channel access strategies are needed to exploit the opportunities provided by full-duplex while dealing with the increased complexity derived from its adoption. In this direction, this paper proposes RTS/CTS in the Frequency Domain (RCFD), a MAC layer scheme for full-duplex ad hoc wireless networks, based on the idea of time-frequency channel contention. According to this approach, different OFDM subcarriers are used to coordinate how nodes access the shared medium. The proposed scheme leads to efficient transmission scheduling with the result of avoiding collisions and exploiting full-duplex opportunities. The considerable performance improvements with respect to standard and state-of-the-art MAC protocols for wireless networks are highlighted through both theoretical analysis and network simulations.Comment: Submitted at IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1605.0971

A Case for Time Slotted Channel Hopping for ICN in the IoT

Recent proposals to simplify the operation of the IoT include the use of Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigms. While this is promising, several challenges remain. In this paper, our core contributions (a) leverage ICN communication patterns to dynamically optimize the use of TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping), a wireless link layer technology increasingly popular in the IoT, and (b) make IoT-style routing adaptive to names, resources, and traffic patterns throughout the network--both without cross-layering. Through a series of experiments on the FIT IoT-LAB interconnecting typical IoT hardware, we find that our approach is fully robust against wireless interference, and almost halves the energy consumed for transmission when compared to CSMA. Most importantly, our adaptive scheduling prevents the time-slotted MAC layer from sacrificing throughput and delay