Distributed Medium Access Control for QoS Support in Wireless Networks

With the rapid growth of multimedia applications and the advances of wireless communication technologies, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services in heterogeneous wireless networks has been an important issue and drawn much attention from both academia and industry. Due to the hostile transmission environment and limited radio resources, QoS provisioning in wireless networks is much more complex and difficult than in its wired counterpart. Moreover, due to the lack of central controller in the networks, distributed network control is required, adding complexity to QoS provisioning. In this thesis, medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning is investigated for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. Originally designed for high-rate data traffic, a WLAN has limited capability to support delay-sensitive voice traffic, and the service for voice traffic may be impacted by data traffic load, resulting in delay violation or large delay variance. Aiming at addressing these limitations, we propose an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition to supporting voice traffic, providing better services for data traffic in WLANs is another focus of our research. In the current WLANs, all the data traffic receives the same best-effort service, and it is difficult to provide further service differentiation for data traffic based on some specific requirements of customers or network service providers. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel token-based scheduling scheme, which provides great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management. As a WLAN has small coverage and cannot meet the growing demand for wireless service requiring communications ``at anywhere and at anytime", a large scale multi-hop wireless network (e.g., wireless ad hoc networks and wireless mesh networks) becomes a necessity. Due to the location-dependent contentions, a number of problems (e.g., hidden/exposed terminal problem, unfairness, and priority reversal problem) appear in a multi-hop wireless environment, posing more challenges for QoS provisioning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks, and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme

Mobile Ad hoc Networking: Imperatives and Challenges

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) represent complex distributed systems that comprise wireless mobile nodes that can freely and dynamically self-organize into arbitrary and temporary, "ad-hoc" network topologies, allowing people and devices to seamlessly internetwork in areas with no pre-existing communication infrastructure, e.g., disaster recovery environments. Ad hoc networking concept is not a new one, having been around in various forms for over 20 years. Traditionally, tactical networks have been the only communication networking application that followed the ad hoc paradigm. Recently, the introduction of new technologies such as the Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11 and Hyperlan are helping enable eventual commercial MANET deployments outside the military domain. These recent evolutions have been generating a renewed and growing interest in the research and development of MANET. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of this dynamic field. It first explains the important role that mobile ad hoc networks play in the evolution of future wireless technologies. Then, it reviews the latest research activities in these areas, including a summary of MANET\u27s characteristics, capabilities, applications, and design constraints. The paper concludes by presenting a set of challenges and problems requiring further research in the future

Multi-layer traffic control for wireless networks

Le reti Wireless LAN, così come definite dallo standard IEEE 802.11, garantiscono connettività senza fili nei cosiddetti “hot-spot” (aeroporti, hotel, etc.), nei campus universitari, nelle intranet aziendali e nelle abitazioni. In tali scenari, le WLAN sono denotate come “ad infrastruttura” nel senso che la copertura della rete è basata sulla presenza di un “Access Point” che fornisce alle stazioni mobili l’accesso alla rete cablata. Esiste un ulteriore approccio (chiamato “ad-hoc”) in cui le stazioni mobili appartenenti alla WLAN comunicano tra di loro senza l’ausilio dell’Access Point. Le Wireless LAN tipicamente sono connesse alla rete di trasporto (che essa sia Internet o una Intranet aziendale) usando un’infrastruttura cablata. Le reti wireless Mesh ad infrastruttura (WIMN) rappresentano un’alternativa valida e meno costosa alla classica infrastruttura cablata. A testimonianza di quanto appena affermato vi è la comparsa e la crescita sul mercato di diverse aziende specializzate nella fornitura di infrastrutture di trasporto wireless e il lancio di varie attività di standardizzazione (tra cui spicca il gruppo 802.11s). La facilità di utilizzo, di messa in opera di una rete wireless e i costi veramente ridotti hanno rappresentato fattori critici per lo straordinario successo di tale tecnologia. Di conseguenza possiamo affermare che la tecnologia wireless ha modificato lo stile di vita degli utenti, il modo di lavorare, il modo di passare il tempo libero (video conferenze, scambio foto, condivisione di brani musicali, giochi in rete, messaggistica istantanea ecc.). D’altro canto, lo sforzo per garantire lo sviluppo di reti capaci di supportare servizi dati ubiqui a velocità di trasferimento elevate è strettamente legato a numerose sfide tecniche tra cui: il supporto per l’handover tra differenti tecnologie (WLAN/3G), la certezza di accesso e autenticazione sicure, la fatturazione e l’accounting unificati, la garanzia di QoS ecc. L’attività di ricerca svolta nell’arco del Dottorato si è focalizzata sulla definizione di meccanismi multi-layer per il controllo del traffico in reti wireless. In particolare, nuove soluzioni di controllo del traffico sono state realizzate a differenti livelli della pila protocollare (dallo strato data-link allo strato applicativo) in modo da fornire: funzionalità avanzate (autenticazione sicura, differenziazione di servizio, handover trasparente) e livelli soddisfacenti di Qualità del Servizio. La maggior parte delle soluzioni proposte in questo lavoro di tesi sono state implementate in test-bed reali. Questo lavoro riporta i risultati della mia attività di ricerca ed è organizzato nel seguente modo: ogni capitolo presenta, ad uno specifico strato della pila protocollare, un meccanismo di controllo del traffico con l’obiettivo di risolvere le problematiche presentate precedentemente. I Capitoli 1 e 2 fanno riferimento allo strato di Trasporto ed investigano il problema del mantenimento della fairness per le connessioni TCP. L’unfairness TCP conduce ad una significativa degradazione delle performance implicando livelli non soddisfacenti di QoS. Questi capitoli descrivono l’attività di ricerca in cui ho impiegato il maggior impegno durante gli studi del dottorato. Nel capitolo 1 viene presentato uno studio simulativo delle problematiche di unfairness TCP e vengono introdotti due possibili soluzioni basate su rate-control. Nel Capitolo 2 viene derivato un modello analitico per la fairness TCP e si propone uno strumento per la personalizzazione delle politiche di fairness. Il capitolo 3 si focalizza sullo strato Applicativo e riporta diverse soluzioni di controllo del traffico in grado di garantire autenticazione sicura in scenari di roaming tra provider wireless. Queste soluzioni rappresentano parte integrante del framework UniWireless, un testbed nazionale sviluppato nell’ambito del progetto TWELVE. Il capitolo 4 descrive, nuovamente a strato Applicativo, una soluzione (basata su SIP) per la gestione della mobilità degli utenti in scenari di rete eterogenei ovvero quando diverse tecnologie di accesso radio sono presenti (802.11/WiFi, Bluetooth, 2.5G/3G). Infine il Capitolo 5 fa riferimento allo strato Data-Link presentando uno studio preliminare di un approccio per il routing e il load-balancing in reti Mesh infrastrutturate.Wireless LANs, as they have been defined by the IEEE 802.11 standard, are shared media enabling connectivity in the so-called “hot-spots” (airports, hotel lounges, etc.), university campuses, enterprise intranets, as well as “in-home” for home internet access. With reference to the above scenarios, WLANs are commonly denoted as “infra-structured” in the sense that WLAN coverage is based on “Access Points” which provide the mobile stations with access to the wired network. In addition to this approach, there exists also an “ad-hoc” mode to organize WLANs where mobile stations talk to each other without the need of Access Points. Wireless LANs are typically connected to the wired backbones (Internet or corporate intranets) using a wired infrastructure. Wireless Infrastructure Mesh Networks (WIMN) may represent a viable and cost-effective alternative to this traditional wired approach. This is witnessed by the emergence and growth of many companies specialized in the provisioning of wireless infrastructure solutions, as well as the launch of standardization activities (such as 802.11s). The easiness of deploying and using a wireless network, and the low deployment costs have been critical factors in the extraordinary success of such technology. As a logical consequence, the wireless technology has allowed end users being connected everywhere – every time and it has changed several things in people’s lifestyle, such as the way people work, or how they live their leisure time (videoconferencing, instant photo or music sharing, network gaming, etc.). On the other side, the effort to develop networks capable of supporting ubiquitous data services with very high data rates in strategic locations is linked with many technical challenges including seamless vertical handovers across WLAN and 3G radio technologies, security, 3G-based authentication, unified accounting and billing, consistent QoS and service provisioning, etc. My PhD research activity have been focused on multi-layer traffic control for Wireless LANs. In particular, specific new traffic control solutions have been designed at different layers of the protocol stack (from the link layer to the application layer) in order to guarantee i) advanced features (secure authentication, service differentiation, seamless handover) and ii) satisfactory level of perceived QoS. Most of the proposed solutions have been also implemented in real testbeds. This dissertation presents the results of my research activity and is organized as follows: each Chapter presents, at a specific layer of the protocol stack, a traffic control mechanism in order to address the introduced above issues. Chapter 1 and Charter 2 refer to the Transport Layer, and they investigate the problem of maintaining fairness for TCP connections. TCP unfairness may result in significant degradation of performance leading to users perceiving unsatisfactory Quality of Service. These Chapters describe the research activity in which I spent the most significant effort. Chapter 1 proposes a simulative study of the TCP fairness issues and two different solutions based on Rate Control mechanism. Chapter 2 illustrates an analytical model of the TCP fairness and derives a framework allowing wireless network providers to customize fairness policies. Chapter 3 focuses on the Application Layer and it presents new traffic control solutions able to guarantee secure authentication in wireless inter-provider roaming scenarios. These solutions are an integral part of the UniWireless framework, a nationwide distributed Open Access testbed that has been jointly realized by different research units within the TWELVE national project. Chapter 4 describes again an Application Layer solution, based on Session Initiation Protocol to manage user mobility and provide seamless mobile multimedia services in a heterogeneous scenario where different radio access technologies are used (802.11/WiFi, Bluetooth, 2.5G/3G networks). Finally Chapter 5 refers to the Data Link Layer and presents a preliminary study of a general approach for routing and load balancing in Wireless Infrastructure Mesh Network. The key idea is to dynamically select routes among a set of slowly changing alternative network paths, where paths are created through the reuse of classical 802.1Q multiple spanning tree mechanisms

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Holistic and efficient link adaptation for 802.11x wireless LANs

Wireless LANs (WLANs), based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, have become the standard means for indoor wireless connectivity. At the same time, the rising number of smart mobile devices, broadband access speeds, and bandwidth hungry applications (e.g., high definition video streaming) have led to an increase not only of usage but also of demand for higher data-rates. This demand for higher rates is being met with newer IEEE 802.11 standards (e.g., 802.11n/ac) that introduce new features and also increase the different possible settings for each feature. Inherent channel variations and the possible interference conditions when operating in unlicensed spectrum necessitate adaptation of the various medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layer features to ensure high performance. Selecting the values of those features to optimise a criterion such as throughput is the link adaptation problem. Link adaptation, the focus of this thesis, can play a key role in improving the performance of 802.11 WLANs. Increasing number of features and feature setting combinations with newer 802.11 standards is not only making link adaptation even more important but also more challenging. The contributions made in this thesis significantly advance the state of the art on link adaptation for 802.11 WLANs along three dimensions. First, we show that not knowing the exact cause of loss is not an impediment to effective link adaptation. Nevertheless, actions taken in response to losses are more crucial and they ought to be holistic and not solely dependent on the exact cause of loss. Second, we make significant methodological contributions for analysing the impact of multiple parameters on a given criterion, based on comprehensive experimental measurements. The application of this methodology on 802.11n measurements, examining the interaction of the protocols various parameters on performance under varying conditions, has lead to several valuable findings on how to perform efficient link adaptation in a complex WLAN scenario like 802.11n and future 802.11 standards. Adaptation should be holistic, based on the channel quality instead of the interference scenario, and independent of loss differentiation. Based on these insights, lastly and most importantly, we propose two novel holistic link adaptation schemes for legacy 802.11a/b/g and 802.11n WLANs, termed Themis and SampleLite, respectively. Both Themis and SampleLite take a hybrid approach relying on easily accessed channel quality information at the sender side to perform holistic adaptation. The hypothesis that adaptation should be holistic is validated by our results, with both Themis and SampleLite outperforming the current state of the art

Reducing Latency in Internet Access Links with Mechanisms in Endpoints and within the Network

Excessive and unpredictable end-to-end latency is a major problem for today’s Internet performance, affecting a range of applications from real-time multimedia to web traffic. This is mainly attributed to the interaction between the TCP congestion control mechanism and the unmanaged large buffers deployed across the Internet. This dissertation investigates transport and link layer solutions to solve the Internet’s latency problem on the access links. These solutions operate on the sender side, within the network or use signaling between the sender and the network based on Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). By changing the sender’s reaction to ECN, a method proposed in this dissertation reduces latency without harming link utilization. Real-life experiments and simulations show that this goal is achieved while maintaining backward compatibility and being gradually deployable on the Internet. This mechanism’s fairness to legacy traffic is further improved by a novel use of ECN within the network

Modeling and Analysis of Two-Flow Interactions in Wireless Networks

Interference plays a complex and often defining role in the performance of wireless networks, especially in multi-hop scenarios. In the presence of interference, Carrier Sense Multiple Access MAC protocols are known to suffer from the hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems, which can cause poor performance and unfairness. In this paper, we examine the possible interference modes arising among two interfering one-hop connections under a Two-Disc model of interference. We classify the large set of resulting configurations into five categories and develop closed form expressions to compute their probability of occurrence. The analysis exposes two new categories, whose occurrence is common, and whose behavior differs significantly from the three known interference categories. Further, the frequency of occurrence of the categories differ significantly from existing results (obtained with a simpler unit disc model of interference). We develop throughput estimation models for the different categories and validate them using simulation

Content aware services using edge to edge overlays

Issued as final reportMotorola, inc

Robust and Interference-Resilient MAC/PHY Layer Strategies for WLANs

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2018. 2. 최성현.Thanks to the explosive growth of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs, IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN), often referred to as WiFi, has become one of the most successful wireless access technologies, supporting ever increasing demand for high data rates at relatively low cost. Encouraged by this remarkable success, the state-of-the-art IEEE 802.11 WLAN provides a physical layer (PHY) data rate of Gb/s to a single user in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, by enabling multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) technology, which utilizes multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver, and channel bonding which aggregates multiple 20 MHz channels up to 160 MHz bandwidth. Furthermore, as a key feature to enhance medium access control (MAC) efficiency, IEEE 802.11 standard defines frame aggregation called aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU), which amortizes PHY protocol overhead over multiple frames by packing several MPDUs into a single frame. In this dissertation, we propose the following three strategies to enhance throughput performance in practice: (1) Mobility-aware PHY rate and A-MPDU length control, (2) Receiver-driven operating channel width adaptation, and (3) Receive architecture for eliminating time-domain interference not overlapping with the desired signal in frequency-domain. Firstly, a significant growth of mobile data traffic volume, primarily generated by portable devices, has led to a change of WLAN communication environmentsthe wireless channel condition in WLAN system is no longer quasi-stationary over the duration of a single frame reception. Especially, frame aggregation, i.e., A-MPDU, which lengthens frame duration significantly, causes the channel state information (CSI) obtained at the preamble can be no longer valid for successfully decoding the latter part of A-MPDUs, when the channel condition substantially changes during the A-MPDU reception. To cope with this problem, we analyze the wireless channel dynamics considering mobility through extensive measurements, and we then build a model which represents the impact of mobility with a noise vector in the I-Q plane, to investigate how the mobility affects the A-MPDU reception performance. Based on our analysis, we develop STRALE, a standard-compliant and mobility-aware PHY rate and A-MPDU length adaptation scheme with ease of implementation. Through extensive simulations with 802.11ac using ns-3 and prototype implementation with commercial 802.11n devices, we demonstrate that STRALE achieves up to 2.9 higher throughput, compared to a fixed duration setting according to IEEE 802.11 standard. STRALE simply requires to update device driver only at one end of the wireless link (i.e., transmitter), thus allowing it to be applicable to any kind of platforms. Second, IEEE 802.11ac supports bandwidth of 20, 40, and 80 MHz as a mandatory feature, and optionally supports 160 MHz bandwidth. To transmit and receive packets using such wide bandwidth, the 802.11ac devices need to increase the size of fast Fourier transform (FFT), equivalently, the baseband bandwidth, referred to as operating channel width (OCW). However, our experiment results reveal various situations where bandwidth adaptation without changing the receivers OCW, leads to poor reception performance due surprisingly to time-domain interference not overlapping with the incoming desired signal in frequency domain. To cope with this problem, we develop RECONN, a standard-compliant and receiver-driven OCW adaptation scheme with ease of implementation. Our prototype implementation in commercial 802.11ac devices shows that RECONN achieves up to 1.85x higher throughput by completely eliminating time-domain interference. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to discover the time-domain interference problem, and to develop OCW adaptation scheme in 802.11ac system. Finally, based on the observation that time-domain interference causes 1) packet detection and synchronization failure, 2) undesirable receive locking problem, and 3) automatic gain control (AGC) failure, we propose a receive architecture called REACTER to eliminate the impact of time-domain interference: REACTER digitally extracts the desired preamble signal not affected by time-domain interference, and provides interference-resilient A-MPDU reception performance by real-time AGC level adaptation during A-MPDU reception. The proposed receive architecture extensively evaluated via IT++ based link-level simulator, and the simulation results show that REACTER significantly improves the frame reception performance by completely eliminates the impact of time-domain interference. In summary, we identify the two existing problems through the extensive measurement and simulations, and we then propose compelling algorithms to improve the throughput performance. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approaches by implementing prototypes in off-the-shelf commercial 802.11n/ac devices, showing that our proposed algorithms fully comply with the 802.11 MAC and requires no PHY modification such that it can be applicable to the existing hardware platform by simply updating the device driver only at one end of the wireless link. Furthermore, we present a novel receive architecture which shows the ability to fundamentally enhance the performance of wide bandwidth operation with very low cost and complexity.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Overview of Existing Approach 3 1.2.1 A-MPDU Length Adaptation 3 1.2.2 Wide Bandwidth Operation in IEEE 802.11ac WLANs 4 1.2.3 Receive Architecture for WLAN Devices 5 1.3 Main Contributions 6 1.3.1 Mobility-Aware PHY Rate and A-MPDU Length Adaptation 6 1.3.2 Receiver-Driven Operating Channel Width Adaptation 7 1.3.3 Rx Architecture for Eliminating Time-Domain Interference 7 1.4 Organization of the Dissertation 8 2 STRALE: Mobility-Aware PHY Rate and A-MPDU Length Adaptation in IEEE 802.11 WLANs 10 2.1 Introduction 10 2.2 Preliminaries . 12 2.2.1 Channel Estimation and Compensation 12 2.2.2 Frame Aggregation 14 2.2.3 Modulation and Coding Schemes 15 2.2.4 MIMO, SM, STBC and channel bonding 15 2.3 Case Study 16 2.3.1 Experimental Setting 16 2.3.2 Temporal Selectivity 17 2.3.3 Impact of Mobility 18 2.3.4 Impact of MCSs 21 2.3.5 IEEE 802.11n/ac Features 22 2.3.6 Rate Adaptation: Minstrel 23 2.4 Caudal Noise Model 25 2.4.1 Caudal Noise Modeling for n x n MIMO Channel 26 2.4.2 Impact of Caudal Noise 28 2.5 STRALE: Proposed Algorithm 30 2.5.1 Possible Solutions for Caudal Loss Problem 31 2.5.2 Operation of STRALE 32 2.6 Performance Evaluation 37 2.6.1 Methodology 37 2.6.2 Simulation Results 39 2.6.3 Prototype Implementation 44 2.7 Summary 46 3 RECONN: Receiver-Driven Operating Channel Width Adaptation in IEEE 802.11ac WLANs 48 3.1 Introduction 48 3.2 Preliminaries 51 3.2.1 Packet Detection and Initial Synchronization 51 3.2.2 Wide Bandwidth Operation 52 3.3 Cast Study 53 3.3.1 Motivation 55 3.3.2 Packet Detection and Synchronization Failure 57 3.3.3 Receive Locking to Interference Signal 59 3.3.4 AGC Failure 61 3.4 RECONN: Proposed Algorithm 64 3.4.1 Possible Solutions 64 3.4.2 RECONN 67 3.5 Performance Evaluation 70 3.5.1 One-to-One Scenario 72 3.5.2 Multi-station Scenario 74 3.6 Summary 75 4 REACTER: Receive Architecture for Eliminating Time-Domain Interference 76 4.1 Introduction 76 4.2 Preliminaries 78 4.2.1 Packet Detection and Synchronization 78 4.2.2 Automatic Gain Control in IEEE 802.11 WLAN 80 4.3 REACTER: Proposed Architecture 80 4.3.1 Simulation Methodology 80 4.3.2 Digital Low Pass Filter (DLPF) 82 4.3.3 Real-Time AGC 89 4.3.4 Structure of REACTER 96 4.4 Performance Evaluation 100 4.5 Summary 101Docto