MAC Centered Cooperation - Synergistic Design of Network Coding, Multi-Packet Reception, and Improved Fairness to Increase Network Throughput

We design a cross-layer approach to aid in develop- ing a cooperative solution using multi-packet reception (MPR), network coding (NC), and medium access (MAC). We construct a model for the behavior of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol and apply it to key small canonical topology components and their larger counterparts. The results obtained from this model match the available experimental results with fidelity. Using this model, we show that fairness allocation by the IEEE 802.11 MAC can significantly impede performance; hence, we devise a new MAC that not only substantially improves throughput, but provides fairness to flows of information rather than to nodes. We show that cooperation between NC, MPR, and our new MAC achieves super-additive gains of up to 6.3 times that of routing with the standard IEEE 802.11 MAC. Furthermore, we extend the model to analyze our MAC's asymptotic and throughput behaviors as the number of nodes increases or the MPR capability is limited to only a single node. Finally, we show that although network performance is reduced under substantial asymmetry or limited implementation of MPR to a central node, there are some important practical cases, even under these conditions, where MPR, NC, and their combination provide significant gains

Node Density Estimation in VANETs Using Received Signal Power

Accurately estimating node density in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks, VANETs, is a challenging and crucial task. Various approaches exist, yet none takes advantage of physical layer parameters in a distributed fashion. This paper describes a framework that allows individual nodes to estimate the node density of their surrounding network independent of beacon messages and other infrastructure-based information. The proposal relies on three factors: 1) a discrete event simulator to estimate the average number of nodes transmitting simultaneously; 2) a realistic channel model for VANETs environment; and 3) a node density estimation technique. This work provides every vehicle on the road with two equations indicating the relation between 1) received signal strength versus simultaneously transmitting nodes, and 2) simultaneously transmitting nodes versus node density. Access to these equations enables individual nodes to estimate their real-time surrounding node density. The system is designed to work for the most complicated scenarios where nodes have no information about the topology of the network and, accordingly, the results indicate that the system is reasonably reliable and accurate. The outcome of this work has various applications and can be used for any protocol that is affected by node density

Towards reliable geographic broadcasting in vehicular networks

In Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs), safety-related messages are broadcasted amongst cars, helping to improve drivers' awareness of the road situation. VANETs’ reliability are highly affected by channel contention. This thesis first addresses the issue of channel use efficiency in geographical broadcasts (geocasts). Constant connectivity changes inside a VANET make the existing routing algorithms unsuitable. This thesis presents a geocast algorithm that uses a metric to estimate the ratio of useful to useless packet received. Simulations showed that this algorithm is more channel-efficient than the farthest-first strategy. It also exposes a parameter, allowing it to adapt to channel load. Second, this thesis presents a method of estimating channel load for providing feedback to moderate the offered load. A theoretical model showing the relationship between channel load and the idle time between transmissions is presented and used to estimate channel contention. Unsaturated stations on the network were shown to have small but observable effects on this relationship. In simulations, channel estimators based on this model show higher accuracy and faster convergence time than by observing packet collisions. These estimators are also less affected by unsaturated stations than by observing packet collisions. Third, this thesis couples the channel estimator to the geocast algorithm, producing a closed-loop load-reactive system that allows geocasts to adapt to instantaneous channel conditions. Simulations showed that this system is not only shown to be more efficient in channel use and be able to adapt to channel contention, but is also able to self-correct suboptimal retransmission decisions. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that all tested network simulators exhibit unexpected behaviours when simulating broadcasts. This thesis describes in depth the error in ns-3, leading to a set of workarounds that allows results from most versions of ns-3 to be interpreted correctly

An Accurate Performance Analysis of Hybrid Efficient and Reliable MAC Protocol in VANET under Non-saturated Conditions

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a technology supporting two types of applications, safety and service applications with higher and lower priorities respectively. Thereby, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is designed to provide reliable and efficient data broadcasting based on prioritization. Different from the IEEE 1609.4 (legacy), HER-MAC protocol is a new multi-channel MAC proposed for VANETs, offering remarkable performance with regards to safety applications transmission. This paper focuses on the analysis of packet delivery ratio of the HER-MAC protocol under non-saturated conditions. 1-D and 2-D Markov chains have been developed for safety and non-safety applications respectively, to evaluate mathematically the performance of HER-MAC protocol. The presented work has taken into account the freezing of the backoff timer for both applications and the backoff stages along with short retry limit for non-safety applications in order to meet the IEEE 802.11p specifications. It highlights that taking these elements into consideration are important in modeling the system, to provide an accurate estimation of the channel access, and guarantees that no packet is served indefinitely. More precise results of the system packet delivery ratio have been yield. The probability of successful transmission and collisions were derived and used to compute the packet delivery ratio. The simulation results validate the analytical results of our models and indicate that the performance of our models outperformed the existing models in terms of the packet delivery ratio under different number of vehicles and contention window

Characterising the interactions between unicast and broadcast in IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks

This paper investigates the relative performance of unicast and broadcast traffic traversing a one-hop ad hoc network utilising the 802.11 DCF. An extended Markov model has been developed and validated through computer simulation, which successfully predicts the respective performance of unicast and broadcast in a variety of mixed traffic scenarios. Under heavy network traffic conditions, a significant divergence is seen to develop between the performance of the two traffic classes - in particular, when network becomes saturated, unicast traffic is effectively given higher precedence over broadcast. As a result, the network becomes dominated by unicast frames, leading to poor rates of broadcast frame delivery

Modeling and analysis of IEEE 1609.4 MAC in the presence of error-prone channels

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been developed to improve the safety, comfort and efficiency of driving on the road. The IEEE 1609.4 is a standard intended to support multi-channel in VANETs. These channels include one control channel for safety applications and six service channels for service applications. However, there is still no comprehensive analysis for the average delay and system throughput of IEEE 1609.4 MAC in VANETs considering error-prone channel under non-saturated conditions. In this paper, we propose an analytical models based on 1-D and 2-D Markov chain to evaluate the performance analysis of IEEE 1609.4 MAC in the presence of error-prone channels. Besides, freezing of the back-off timer is taken into consideration to provide an accurate estimation of access to the channel. The simulation results have been carried out to validate the analytical results of our model. The results show that the performance of our model outperforms the existing model in terms of packet delivery ratio and average delay of safety packets over CCH, and system throughput of service packets over SCHs