Enhancement of QoS support of HCCA schedulers using EDCA function in IEEE 802.11e networks

The IEEE 802.11e standard introduces Quality of Service support for wireless local area networks through two MAC functions: Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA). While the former provides prioritized contention-based access to the medium, the latter uses a parameterized contention-free polling scheme. Several studies have proposed enhancements to EDCA or improved scheduling algorithms for HCCA to properly support VBR traffic. However, the cooperation between these functions has only marginally been considered and the solutions vary depending on specific traffic requirements. In this paper we propose a novel approach to address the problem of scheduling VBR traffic streams. Our scheduler, named Overboost, uses HCCA to negotiate a minimum bandwidth and deals with traffic streams that require more bandwidth than the negotiated one by redirecting the excess bandwidth to the EDCA function. An analytical evaluation has been conducted and the results has been corroborated by an extensive set of simulations. They show that the overall scheduler improves the performance with respect to other HCCA schedulers in terms of null rate, throughput, access delay, and queue length

Packet level measurement over wireless access

PhDPerformance Measurement of the IP packet networks mainly comprise of monitoring the network performance in terms of packet losses and delays. If used appropriately, these network parameters (i.e. delay, loss and bandwidth etc) can indicate the performance status of the network and they can be used in fault and performance monitoring, network provisioning, and traffic engineering. Globally, there is a growing need for accurate network measurement to support the commercial use of IP networks. In wireless networks, transmission losses and communication delays strongly affect the performance of the network. Compared to wired networks, wireless networks experience higher levels of data dropouts, and corruption due to issues of channel fading, noise, interference and mobility. Performance monitoring is a vital element in the commercial future of broadband packet networking and the ability to guarantee quality of service in such networks is implicit in Service Level Agreements. Active measurements are performed by injecting probes, and this is widely used to determine the end to end performance. End to end delay in wired networks has been extensively investigated, and in this thesis we report on the accuracy achieved by probing for end to end delay over a wireless scenario. We have compared two probing techniques i.e. Periodic and Poisson probing, and estimated the absolute error for both. The simulations have been performed for single hop and multi- hop wireless networks. In addition to end to end latency, Active measurements have also been performed for packet loss rate. The simulation based analysis has been tried under different traffic scenarios using Poisson Traffic Models. We have sampled the user traffic using Periodic probing at different rates for single hop and multiple hop wireless scenarios. 5 Active probing becomes critical at higher values of load forcing the network to saturation much earlier. We have evaluated the impact of monitoring overheads on the user traffic, and show that even small amount of probing overhead in a wireless medium can cause large degradation in network performance. Although probing at high rate provides a good estimation of delay distribution of user traffic with large variance yet there is a critical tradeoff between the accuracy of measurement and the packet probing overhead. Our results suggest that active probing is highly affected by probe size, rate, pattern, traffic load, and nature of shared medium, available bandwidth and the burstiness of the traffic

Avaliação do desempenho de novos serviços em redes IP

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesOs benefícios económicos de fornecer múltiplos serviços numa única rede têm despertado grande interesse na introdução dos serviços VoIP e IPTV na internet. No entanto, estes serviços possuem requisitos rigorosos de qualidade de serviço, que a internet não está preparada para fornecer. Esta dissertação possui dois objectivos principais: O primeiro consiste em testar o comportamento dos serviços de IPTV e VoIP nas tecnologias IP existentes como Ethernet, IEEE 802.11 e ADSL quando expostas a diferentes condições de carga. Pretende-se também identificar os efeitos nos serviços de VoIP e IPTV de outros serviços como FTP, correio electrónico e HTTP. Foi utilizado OpNet um simulador de redes bastante popular ao no ambiente académico. Os resultados das simulações fornecem orientações importantes sobre a capacidade máxima de cada tecnologia tendo em conta os requisitos de qualidade de serviço; por outro lado identificam os serviços mais destrutivos para IPTV e VoIP. O segundo objectivo é a implementação de um modelo que permite a monitorização dos serviços de VoIP e IPTV, analisa os indicadores de desempenho reunidos e grava esses indicadores numa base de dados. Todo este processo será efectuado em tempo real com o objectivo de manter a base de dados actualizada. Os resultados disponibilizados por esta estrutura permitem uma melhor gestão da rede, os prestadores de serviços podem ter informações actualizadas sobre o desempenho dos seus serviços, consequentemente é possível identificar uma falha ou uma tendência futura. ABSTRACT: The economical benefits of providing multiple services over a single network infrastructure have spawned great interest in the introduction of new services, such VoIP and IPTV, in the Internet. However, these services have stringent Quality of Service requirements that the Internet was not designed to meet. This dissertation has two main objectives: The first objective is to test the behavior of IPTV and VoIP services in the existing IP network technologies such as Ethernet, IEEE 802.11 and ADSL when exposed to different load conditions; and identify the effects of other services such as FTP, Email and HTTP in VoIP and IPTV demands. In our work we use OpNet, a popular network simulator in the academic environment. The simulation results provide important guidelines about the maximum capacity of each technology keeping in mind QoS requirements; on the other hand, they enable identification of the most damaging services for VoIP and IPTV. The second objective is the implementation of a framework that allows monitoring VoIP and IPTV services, analyzing the collected performance measurements, and storing them in a database; all these processes will be performed in real time in order to keep the database up to date. The results available by this framework allow a better network management, the service providers can have current information about their services performance, and consequently it is possible to identify a failure or a future trend

Recent Advances in Wireless Communications and Networks

This book focuses on the current hottest issues from the lowest layers to the upper layers of wireless communication networks and provides "real-time" research progress on these issues. The authors have made every effort to systematically organize the information on these topics to make it easily accessible to readers of any level. This book also maintains the balance between current research results and their theoretical support. In this book, a variety of novel techniques in wireless communications and networks are investigated. The authors attempt to present these topics in detail. Insightful and reader-friendly descriptions are presented to nourish readers of any level, from practicing and knowledgeable communication engineers to beginning or professional researchers. All interested readers can easily find noteworthy materials in much greater detail than in previous publications and in the references cited in these chapters

Analysis and Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11 WLAN

With fast deployment of wireless local area networks VoIP over IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is growing very fast and is providing a cost effective alternative for voice communications. WLANs were initially set up to handle bursty nonreal time type of data traffic. Therefore, the wireless access protocols initially defined are not suitable for voice traffic. Subsequently, updates in the standard have been made to provision for QoS requirements of data, especially the real time traffic of the type voice and video. Despite these updates, however, transmitting voice traffic over WLAN does not utilize the available bandwidth (BW) efficiently, and the number of simultaneous calls supported in practice is significantly lower than what the BW figures would suggest. Several modifications have been proposed to improve the call capacity, and recently isochronous coordination function (ICF) was introduced to mitigate the problem of low call capacity. The proposed modified ICF which further improves the performance in terms of the call capacity. The proposed scheme uses multiplexing and multicasting in the downlink to substantially increase the call capacity

Improving the QoS support in HCCA-EDCA mixed IEEE 802.11e networks

The multimedia applications require the network to provide a trustworthy service suitable to meet their Quality of Service and real-time requirements, managing efficiently the available resources. In this paper we present a performing solution for the multimedia support over IEEE 802.11e networks that aims to combine both its Medium Access Control functions, Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF) Controlled Channel Access (HCCA), in order to reduce the experienced delay. The proposed scheduler, local to the node, cooperates with the centralized HCCA scheduler, integrating the offered service using the EDCA available resources. The simulations show that the overall scheduler improves the performance with respect to the HCCA schedulers in terms of scheduling efficiency and delay, allowing to guarantee the expected service level

Elastic QoS Scheduling with Step-by-Step Propagation in IEEE 802.11e Networks with Multimedia Traffic

The spreading diffusion of wireless devices and the crowded coexistence of multimedia applications greedy of bandwidth and with strict requirements stress the service provisioning offered by wireless technologies. WiFi is a reference for wireless connectivity and it requires a continuous evolution of its mechanism in order to follow increasingly demanding service needs. In particular, despite the evolution of physical layer, some critical contexts, such as industrial networks, telemedicine, telerehabilitation, and virtual training, require further refined improvements in order to ensure the respect of strict real-time service requirements. In this paper an in-depth analysis of Dynamic TXOP HCCA (DTH) MAC enhanced centralized scheduler is illustrated and it is further refined introducing a new improvement, DTH with threshold. DTH and DTH with threshold can be integrated with preexisting centralized schedulers in order to improve their performances, without any overprovisioning that can negatively impact on the admission control feasibility test. Indeed, without modifying the centralized scheduler policy, they combine together the concepts of reclaiming transmission time and statistical estimation of the traffic profile in order to provide, at each polling, an instantaneous transmission time tailored to the variable traffic requirements, increasing, when necessary, the service data rate. These mechanisms can coexist with advanced physical layer-based solutions, providing the required service differentiation. Experimental results and theoretical analysis, based on elastic scheduler theory, show that they are effective especially in the case of Variable Bit Rate traffic streams in terms of transmission queues length, packets loss, delay, and throughput