Adaptive thresholding based optimal rate and MIMO mode selection scheme for IEEE 802.11n WLAN

The emergence of multiple antenna technology in IEEE 802.11n WLAN  has resulted in performance improvement in terms of throughput as well as transmission reliability as compared to legacy standards. Link adaptive transmission is critical to WLAN. Most of the existing algorithms for MIMO mode adaptation (between spatial multiplexing and diversity encoding) use fixed SNR switching thresholds for rate selection. The use of a fixed threshold in both MIMO modes, however, can only provide smaller throughput gain. The present studies on link adaptation do not consider the fundamental characteristic difference in the diversity encoding and spatial multiplexing encoding for MIMO. In this paper we propose a novel adaptive thresholding based optimal rate and MIMO mode (ORMM) algorithm for 802.11n wireless network. The proposed scheme adaptively switches between two SNR switching threshold vectors, separately determined for each MIMO mode analytically. Simulations over the Rayleigh fading channel shows that ORMM outperforms the existing approach of MIMO rate adaptation based on the use of fixed switching thresholds for rate selection

TOWARDS A HOLISTIC RATE ADAPTION FOR 802.1 1N/AC MIMO SYSTEMS

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Optimal Rate Sampling in 802.11 Systems

In 802.11 systems, Rate Adaptation (RA) is a fundamental mechanism allowing transmitters to adapt the coding and modulation scheme as well as the MIMO transmission mode to the radio channel conditions, and in turn, to learn and track the (mode, rate) pair providing the highest throughput. So far, the design of RA mechanisms has been mainly driven by heuristics. In contrast, in this paper, we rigorously formulate such design as an online stochastic optimisation problem. We solve this problem and present ORS (Optimal Rate Sampling), a family of (mode, rate) pair adaptation algorithms that provably learn as fast as it is possible the best pair for transmission. We study the performance of ORS algorithms in both stationary radio environments where the successful packet transmission probabilities at the various (mode, rate) pairs do not vary over time, and in non-stationary environments where these probabilities evolve. We show that under ORS algorithms, the throughput loss due to the need to explore sub-optimal (mode, rate) pairs does not depend on the number of available pairs, which is a crucial advantage as evolving 802.11 standards offer an increasingly large number of (mode, rate) pairs. We illustrate the efficiency of ORS algorithms (compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms) using simulations and traces extracted from 802.11 test-beds.Comment: 52 page

Advanced Wireless LAN

The past two decades have witnessed starling advances in wireless LAN technologies that were stimulated by its increasing popularity in the home due to ease of installation, and in commercial complexes offering wireless access to their customers. This book presents some of the latest development status of wireless LAN, covering the topics on physical layer, MAC layer, QoS and systems. It provides an opportunity for both practitioners and researchers to explore the problems that arise in the rapidly developed technologies in wireless LAN

Advanced Protocols for Peer-to-Peer Data Transmission in Wireless Gigabit Networks

This thesis tackles problems on IEEE 802.11 MAC layer, network layer and application layer, to further push the performance of wireless P2P applications in a holistic way. It contributes to the better understanding and utilization of two major IEEE 802.11 MAC features, frame aggregation and block acknowledgement, to the design and implementation of opportunistic networks on off-the-shelf hardware and proposes a document exchange protocol, including document recommendation. First, this thesis contributes a measurement study of the A-MPDU frame aggregation behavior of IEEE 802.11n in a real-world, multi-hop, indoor mesh testbed. Furthermore, this thesis presents MPDU payload adaptation (MPA) to utilize A-MPDU subframes to increase the overall throughput under bad channel conditions. MPA adapts the size of MAC protocol data units to channel conditions, to increase the throughput and lower the delay in error-prone channels. The results suggest that under erroneous conditions throughput can be maximized by limiting the MPDU size. As second major contribution, this thesis introduces Neighborhood-aware OPPortunistic networking on Smartphones (NOPPoS). NOPPoS creates an opportunistic, pocket-switched network using current generation, off-the-shelf mobile devices. As main novel feature, NOPPoS is highly responsive to node mobility due to periodic, low-energy scans of its environment, using Bluetooth Low Energy advertisements. The last major contribution is the Neighborhood Document Sharing (NDS) protocol. NDS enables users to discover and retrieve arbitrary documents shared by other users in their proximity, i.e. in the communication range of their IEEE 802.11 interface. However, IEEE 802.11 connections are only used on-demand during file transfers and indexing of files in the proximity of the user. Simulations show that NDS interconnects over 90 \% of all devices in communication range. Finally, NDS is extended by the content recommendation system User Preference-based Probability Spreading (UPPS), a graph-based approach. It integrates user-item scoring into a graph-based tag-aware item recommender system. UPPS utilizes novel formulas for affinity and similarity scoring, taking into account user-item preference in the mass diffusion of the recommender system. The presented results show that UPPS is a significant improvement to previous approaches