Improved IEEE 802.11 point coordination function considering fiber-delay difference in distributed antenna systems

In this paper, we present an improved IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area network (WLAN) medium access control (MAC) mechanism for simulcast radio-over-fiber-based distributed antenna systems where multiple remote antenna units (RAUs) are connected to one access point (AP). In the improved mechanism, the fiber delay between RAUs and central unit is taken into account in a modification to the conventional point coordination function (PCF) that achieves coordination by a centralized algorithm. Simulation results show that the improved PCF outperforms the distributed coordination function (DCF) in both the basic-access and request/clear-to-send modes in terms of the total throughput and the fairness among RAU

A novel multipath-transmission supported software defined wireless network architecture

The inflexible management and operation of today\u27s wireless access networks cannot meet the increasingly growing specific requirements, such as high mobility and throughput, service differentiation, and high-level programmability. In this paper, we put forward a novel multipath-transmission supported software-defined wireless network architecture (MP-SDWN), with the aim of achieving seamless handover, throughput enhancement, and flow-level wireless transmission control as well as programmable interfaces. In particular, this research addresses the following issues: 1) for high mobility and throughput, multi-connection virtual access point is proposed to enable multiple transmission paths simultaneously over a set of access points for users and 2) wireless flow transmission rules and programmable interfaces are implemented into mac80211 subsystem to enable service differentiation and flow-level wireless transmission control. Moreover, the efficiency and flexibility of MP-SDWN are demonstrated in the performance evaluations conducted on a 802.11 based-testbed, and the experimental results show that compared to regular WiFi, our proposed MP-SDWN architecture achieves seamless handover and multifold throughput improvement, and supports flow-level wireless transmission control for different applications