29 research outputs found
Experimenting with commodity 802.11 hardware: overview and future directions
The huge adoption of 802.11 technologies has triggered a vast amount of experimentally-driven research works. These works range from performance analysis to protocol enhancements, including the proposal of novel applications and services. Due to the affordability of the technology, this experimental research is typically based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices, and, given the rate at which 802.11 releases new standards (which are adopted into new, affordable devices), the field is likely to continue to produce results. In this paper, we review and categorise the most prevalent works carried out with 802.11 COTS devices over the past 15 years, to present a timely snapshot of the areas that have attracted the most attention so far, through a taxonomy that distinguishes between performance studies, enhancements, services, and methodology. In this way, we provide a quick overview of the results achieved by the research community that enables prospective authors to identify potential areas of new research, some of which are discussed after the presentation of the survey.This work has been partly supported by the European Community through the CROWD project (FP7-ICT-318115) and by the Madrid Regional Government through the TIGRE5-CM program (S2013/ICE-2919).Publicad
Improving packet delivery efficiency using multi-radio diversity in wireless LANs
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-120).Data transmissions in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) often suffer from bit errors that arise from the notoriously complex and time-varying signal propagation characteristics of the wireless medium. A number of physical factors such as attenuation and multi-path are prevalent indoors and can lead to high bit-error rates at the link layer. These in turn lead to packet losses, low throughput, and higher and more variable packet latencies observed at higher layers, degrading the performance of many delay-sensitive and traffic-intensive wireless applications such as games, file-sharing, voice-over-IP, and streaming video. We use the notion of path diversity to develop an approach that improves data delivery efficiency and throughput in presence of transmission errors. Path diversity relies on multiple access points (APs) covering a given area or multiple radios on the user's device (or both). The hypothesis underlying this system is as follows: because frame errors are often path-dependent (e.g., due to multi-path fading), location-dependent (e.g., due to noise), and statistically independent between different transmitting radios, transmissions are likely to succeed from at least one of the available transmitters (transmit diversity).(cont.) Likewise, multiple radios that all receive versions of the same transmission may together be able to correctly recover a frame, even when any given individual radio is not (receive diversity). Using these principles, we design and implement the Multi-Radio Diversity (MRD) system, which leverages the properties of path diversity at the transmitter and receiver to reduce frame loss rates in the link-layer, leading to increased throughput and packet delivery efficiency. We introduce several techniques that make path selection, retransmission, and rate adaptation work efficiently in a MRD system based on the 802.11 MAC. We used commodity PCs and wireless interfaces to build a MRD system and conducted a wide range of indoor experiments. Our experiments measured throughput gains up to three times over conventional schemes without consuming much extra wireless bandwidth.by Allen Ka Lun Miu.Ph.D
Multimedia
The nowadays ubiquitous and effortless digital data capture and processing capabilities offered by the majority of devices, lead to an unprecedented penetration of multimedia content in our everyday life. To make the most of this phenomenon, the rapidly increasing volume and usage of digitised content requires constant re-evaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies, in order to meet the relentless change of requirements from both the user and system perspectives. Advances in Multimedia provides readers with an overview of the ever-growing field of multimedia by bringing together various research studies and surveys from different subfields that point out such important aspects. Some of the main topics that this book deals with include: multimedia management in peer-to-peer structures & wireless networks, security characteristics in multimedia, semantic gap bridging for multimedia content and novel multimedia applications
MOBILITY SUPPORT ARCHITECTURES FOR NEXT-GENERATION WIRELESS NETWORKS
With the convergence of the wireless networks and the Internet and the booming
demand for multimedia applications, the next-generation (beyond the third generation, or
B3G) wireless systems are expected to be all IP-based and provide real-time and non-real-time
mobile services anywhere and anytime. Powerful and efficient mobility support is
thus the key enabler to fulfil such an attractive vision by supporting various mobility
scenarios. This thesis contributes to this interesting while challenging topic.
After a literature review on mobility support architectures and protocols, the thesis
starts presenting our contributions with a generic multi-layer mobility support framework,
which provides a general approach to meet the challenges of handling comprehensive
mobility issues. The cross-layer design methodology is introduced to coordinate the
protocol layers for optimised system design. Particularly, a flexible and efficient cross-layer
signalling scheme is proposed for interlayer interactions. The proposed generic
framework is then narrowed down with several fundamental building blocks identified to
be focused on as follows.
As widely adopted, we assume that the IP-based access networks are organised into
administrative domains, which are inter-connected through a global IP-based wired core
network. For a mobile user who roams from one domain to another, macro (inter-domain)
mobility management should be in place for global location tracking and effective handoff
support for both real-time and non-real-lime applications. Mobile IP (MIP) and the Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP) are being adopted as the two dominant standard-based macro-mobility
architectures, each of which has mobility entities and messages in its own right.
The work explores the joint optimisations and interactions of MIP and SIP when utilising
the complementary power of both protocols. Two distinctive integrated MIP-SIP
architectures are designed and evaluated, compared with their hybrid alternatives and other
approaches. The overall analytical and simulation results shown significant performance
improvements in terms of cost-efficiency, among other metrics.
Subsequently, for the micro (intra-domain) mobility scenario where a mobile user
moves across IP subnets within a domain, a micro mobility management architecture is
needed to support fast handoffs and constrain signalling messaging loads incurred by intra-domain
movements within the domain. The Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) and the Fast
Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) protocols are selected to fulfil the design requirements.
The work proposes enhancements to these protocols and combines them in an optimised
way. resulting in notably improved performances in contrast to a number of alternative
approaches
Radio Communications
In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks
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
Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of-the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: quality-of-service and video communication, routing protocol and cross-layer design. A few interesting problems about security and delay-tolerant networks are also discussed. This book is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks
Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users
The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile
computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better
performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including
multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels
Performance of Wi-Fi coordination schemes for VolP in the presence of FTP data.
Evolved 3GPP cellular core networks have made co-existence of heterogeneous Wireless Access networks
(HetNets) possible. The evolved core network along with the development of multimode end user devices
have led to the realisation of converged Access Networks. Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are
assuming a prominent role in the telecommunications ecosystem due to their cost effectiveness, ease of
deployment and operation in the free spectrum. Although WLANs are only data centric, there will be
greater demand for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) over WLANs as multimode smart-phones become
accessible and operators integrate WLANs into their business models. Therefore, it is imperative that
WLAN’s ability to support VoIP services is thoroughly understood. Currently, the design of call admission
control mechanisms for WLANs that support heterogeneous (data and voice) traffic is a challenging issue.
The challenge stems from the difficulty of modelling the behaviour heterogeneous traffic, mixed VoIP and
data traffic.
IEEE 802.11 WLANs use two types of medium access schemes, the polling based schemes and the
contention based schemes. Both types of WLAN coordination schemes have not been thoroughly
investigated for their ability to support VoIP over WLANs in the presence of File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
data sessions. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a Transport Control Protocol(TCP) based file exchange
protocol. TCP was optimised for wired networks and as a result it is unsuitable for wireless network.
Furthermore, it was not optimised to co-exist with VoIP and as a result of its burstiness it has severe
impact on the jitter, packet-loss and delay of VoIP traffic.
The purpose of the work presented in this report is to evaluate the performance of Distributed Coordinated Function (DCF), Point Coordination Function (PCF) and Enhanced Distributed Coordinated
Function (EDCF) techniques’ ability to manage Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) over WLAN in the
presence of contending heavy FTP data. The key question this work seeks to answer is, are the Medium
Access Control (MAC) coordination techniques in their present form capable of carrying VoIP data in the
presence of other data. In other words, how realistic is the deployment of VoIP services with FTP services
in the same network, using the current coordination schemes for WLAN? Can these coordination schemes
be improved by using current MAC enhancements such as fragmentation and increasing the Access Point
buffer?
The study is carried out for IEEE 802.11g as this is still the most widely deployed standard. The
performance is evaluated by setting up a network of stations that generate both voice and FTP traffic in
OPNET. The two network configurations are 30-Voice stations and 30-FTP stations; 15-Voice stations and
45-FTP stations. Moreover, two codecs G.711 and G.723 are compared to assess the effect of codec
selection on performance
Satellite Networks: Architectures, Applications, and Technologies
Since global satellite networks are moving to the forefront in enhancing the national and global information infrastructures due to communication satellites' unique networking characteristics, a workshop was organized to assess the progress made to date and chart the future. This workshop provided the forum to assess the current state-of-the-art, identify key issues, and highlight the emerging trends in the next-generation architectures, data protocol development, communication interoperability, and applications. Presentations on overview, state-of-the-art in research, development, deployment and applications and future trends on satellite networks are assembled