Enhanced Collision Resolution for the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function

The IEEE 802.11 standard relies on the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) as the fundamental medium access control method. DCF uses the Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB) algorithm to regulate channel access. The backoff period determined by BEB depends on a contention window (CW) whose size is doubled if a station suffers a collision and reset to its minimum value after a successful transmission. BEB doubles the CW size upon collision to reduce the collision probability in retransmission. However, this CW increase reduces channel access time because stations will spend more time sensing the channel rather than accessing it. Although resetting the CW to its minimum value increases channel access, it negatively affects fairness because it favours successfully transmitting stations over stations suffering from collisions. Moreover, resetting CW leads to increasing the collision probability and therefore increases the number of collisions. % Quality control editor: Please ensure that the intended meaning has been maintained in the edits of the previous sentence. Since increasing channel access time and reducing the probability of collisions are important factors to improve the DCF performance, and they conflict with each other, improving one will have an adverse effect on the other and consequently will harm the DCF performance. We propose an algorithm, \gls{ECRA}, that solves collisions once they occur without instantly increasing the CW size. Our algorithm reduces the collision probability without affecting channel access time. We also propose an accurate analytical model that allows comparing the theoretical saturation and maximum throughputs of our algorithm with those of benchmark algorithms. Our model uses a collision probability that is dependent on the station transmission history and thus provides a precise estimation of the probability that a station transmits in a random timeslot, which results in a more accurate throughput analysis. We present extensive simulations for fixed and mobile scenarios. The results show that on average, our algorithm outperformed BEB in terms of throughput and fairness. Compared to other benchmark algorithms, our algorithm improved, on average, throughput and delay performance

Wi-Fi QoS improvements for industrial automation

Digitalization caused a considerable increase in the use of industrial automation applications. Industrial automation applications use real-time traffic with strict requirements of connection of tens of devices, high-reliability, determinism, low-latency, and synchronization. The current solutions meeting these requirements are wired technologies. However, there is a need for wireless technologies for mobility,less complexity, and quick deployment. There are many studies on cellular technologies for industrial automation scenarios with strict reliability and latency requirements, but not many developments for wireless communications over unlicensed bands. Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is a commonly used and preferred technology in factory automation since it is supported by many applications and operates on a license free-band. However, there is still room for improving Wi-Fi systems performance for low-latency and high-reliable communication requirements in industrial automation use cases. There are various limitations in the current Wi-Fi system restraining the deployment for time-critical operations. For meeting the strict timing requirements of low delay and jitter in industrial automation applications, Quality of Service (QoS)in Wi-Fi needs to be improved. In this thesis, a new access category in Medium Access Control (MAC) layer for industrial automation applications is proposed.The performance improvement is analyzed with simulations, and a jitter definition for a Wi-Fi system is studied. Then, a fixed Modulation and Coding (MCS) link adaptation method and bounded delay is implemented for time-critical traffic in the simulation cases to observe performance changes. Finally, it is shown that the new access category with no backoff time can decrease the delay and jitter of time-critical applications. The improvements in Wi-Fi QoS are shown in comparison with the current standard, and additional enhancements about using a fixed modulation and coding scheme and implementation of a bounded delay are also analyzed in this thesi

Achieving Low latency and High Packet Reception Ratio in Media Access Control Layer in VANET

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) or inter-vehiclecommunication (IVC) makes possible the development of a number ofinnovative and powerful transportation system applications. VANETtechnology proves an important extension of both cellular andwireless local area networks (WLANs) currently used in thetransportation industry. It is widely recognized that thetransportation industry serves as an ideal platform for a largenumber of existing and future wireless applications, many of whichhave yet to be developed for commercial use.Safety messaging is one of the most critical uses for VANET,supporting a number of potential safety applications, e.g. emergencyelectronic brake lights, lane change and pre-crash warning, amongothers. Many applications require extremely low latency (less than100ms) and highly reliable (over 99\% packet delivery ratio)communication services. In order to satisfy these criticalrequirements, an efficient media access control (MAC) layer isnecessary. At the time of this writing, a de facto standard of VANETMAC is being developed.Extensive VANET MAC research with regard to safety applications hasyet to be done. The proposed base for the VANET future standard usesan 802.11a media access layer whose performance-although studied-isknown to contain deficiencies and was accomplished outside theVANET context. These factors motivated the author to initiate thestudy of VANET and MAC.In this work, MAC for VANET MAC is extensively researched, and ahistory of MAC is initially reviewed. The special and criticalrequirements of VANET MAC are presented and four major categorieswere investigated and analyzed. Because the under-development of802.11p is based on the IEEE 802.11a, special consideration is givenwith regard to the performance of 802.11a MAC and associatedrequirements. Extensive research enhancements centering on safetyapplications of the 802.11 MAC are conducted. The author's researchgenerated a platform in which VANET performance can bequantitatively evaluated, analyzed, and verified. The quantitativebehavior of the current protocols/algorithms, which include delayand packet delivery ratio, are presented on this platform.Furthermore, the future protocol and algorithm proposals can beadded into this platform so that a faster research cycle can beachieved. Through theoretical analysis and simulation, thisinvestigation shows that current proposed VANET MAC and 802.11a MACenhancements have yet met the critical requirements of VANET. Thefuture work may focus on how to use this theoretical model andsimulation tool to assist MAC layer protocol design. Meanwhile, whennew algorithms are proposed or accepted by the standard, this modeland tool can serve as a fast and convenient platform, where the newalgorithm can be easily added for the sake of evaluation andverification. The feasibility of relaxing some assumptions includedtherein, such as the hidden node problem in a two dimensional space,may also be studied to make the platform closer to a real system

Group-Based Medium Access Control for IEEE 802.11n Wireless LANs

Abstract-The latest generation of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is based on IEEE 802.11n-2009 Standard. The standard provides very high data rates at the physical layer and aims to achieve a throughput at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer that is higher than 100 Mbps. To do that, the standard introduces several mechanisms to improve the MAC efficiency. The most notable ones are the use of frame aggregation and Block-ACK frames. The standard, however, doesn't introduce a mechanism to reduce the probability of collision. This issue is significant because, with a high data rate, an AP would be able to serve a large number of stations, which would result in a high collision rate. In this paper, we propose a Group-based MAC (GMAC) scheme that reduces the probability of collision and also uses frame aggregation to improve the efficiency. The contending stations are divided into groups. Each group has one station that is the group leader. Only the leader stations contend, hence, reducing the probability of a collision. We evaluate the performance of our scheme with analytic and simulation results. The results show that GMAC achieves a high throughput, high fairness, low delay and maintains a high performance with high data rates

Quality of service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless LANs

Delivering multimedia content to heterogeneous devices over a variable networking environment while maintaining high quality levels involves many technical challenges. The research reported in this thesis presents a solution for Quality of Service (QoS)-based service differentiation when delivering multimedia content over the wireless LANs. This thesis has three major contributions outlined below: 1. A Model-based Bandwidth Estimation algorithm (MBE), which estimates the available bandwidth based on novel TCP and UDP throughput models over IEEE 802.11 WLANs. MBE has been modelled, implemented, and tested through simulations and real life testing. In comparison with other bandwidth estimation techniques, MBE shows better performance in terms of error rate, overhead, and loss. 2. An intelligent Prioritized Adaptive Scheme (iPAS), which provides QoS service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless networks. iPAS assigns dynamic priorities to various streams and determines their bandwidth share by employing a probabilistic approach-which makes use of stereotypes. The total bandwidth to be allocated is estimated using MBE. The priority level of individual stream is variable and dependent on stream-related characteristics and delivery QoS parameters. iPAS can be deployed seamlessly over the original IEEE 802.11 protocols and can be included in the IEEE 802.21 framework in order to optimize the control signal communication. iPAS has been modelled, implemented, and evaluated via simulations. The results demonstrate that iPAS achieves better performance than the equal channel access mechanism over IEEE 802.11 DCF and a service differentiation scheme on top of IEEE 802.11e EDCA, in terms of fairness, throughput, delay, loss, and estimated PSNR. Additionally, both objective and subjective video quality assessment have been performed using a prototype system. 3. A QoS-based Downlink/Uplink Fairness Scheme, which uses the stereotypes-based structure to balance the QoS parameters (i.e. throughput, delay, and loss) between downlink and uplink VoIP traffic. The proposed scheme has been modelled and tested through simulations. The results show that, in comparison with other downlink/uplink fairness-oriented solutions, the proposed scheme performs better in terms of VoIP capacity and fairness level between downlink and uplink traffic

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

Resource Management schemes for mobile ad hoc networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Real-Time Sensor Networks and Systems for the Industrial IoT

The Industrial Internet of Things (Industrial IoT—IIoT) has emerged as the core construct behind the various cyber-physical systems constituting a principal dimension of the fourth Industrial Revolution. While initially born as the concept behind specific industrial applications of generic IoT technologies, for the optimization of operational efficiency in automation and control, it quickly enabled the achievement of the total convergence of Operational (OT) and Information Technologies (IT). The IIoT has now surpassed the traditional borders of automation and control functions in the process and manufacturing industry, shifting towards a wider domain of functions and industries, embraced under the dominant global initiatives and architectural frameworks of Industry 4.0 (or Industrie 4.0) in Germany, Industrial Internet in the US, Society 5.0 in Japan, and Made-in-China 2025 in China. As real-time embedded systems are quickly achieving ubiquity in everyday life and in industrial environments, and many processes already depend on real-time cyber-physical systems and embedded sensors, the integration of IoT with cognitive computing and real-time data exchange is essential for real-time analytics and realization of digital twins in smart environments and services under the various frameworks’ provisions. In this context, real-time sensor networks and systems for the Industrial IoT encompass multiple technologies and raise significant design, optimization, integration and exploitation challenges. The ten articles in this Special Issue describe advances in real-time sensor networks and systems that are significant enablers of the Industrial IoT paradigm. In the relevant landscape, the domain of wireless networking technologies is centrally positioned, as expected

Position-Based Multicast for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In general, routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) can be classified into topology-based protocols and position-based protocols. While for unicast routing many proposals for both classes exist, the existing approaches to multicast routing basically implement topology-based algorithms and only a few of them make use of the geographic positions of the network nodes. These have in common that the sending node has to precalculate the multicast tree over which the packets are distributed and store it in each packet header. This involves two main issues: (a) These approaches are not very flexible with regard to topological changes which abandons the advantages that position-based routing has against topology-based routing, and (b) they do not scale with the number of receivers, since every one of them has to be named in the packet header. This thesis solves these issues and further advances position-based multicast routing. Position-Based Multicast (PBM) enhances the flexibility of position-based multicast routing by following the forwarding principle of position-based unicast routing. It transfers the choice of the next hops in the tree from the sender to the forwarding nodes. Based on the positions of their neighboring nodes, these are able to determine the most suitable next hop(s) at the moment when the packet is being forwarded. The scalability with respect to the number of receiving nodes in a group is solved by Scalable Position-Based Multicast (SPBM). It includes a membership management fulfilling different tasks at once. First, it administers group memberships in order to provide multicast sources with information on whether nodes are subscribed to a specific group. Second, it implements a location service providing the multicast sources with the positions of the subscribed receiver nodes. And third, it geographically aggregates membership data in order to achieve the desired scalability. The group management features two modes of operation: The proactive variant produces a bounded overhead scaling well with the size of the network. The reactive alternative, in contrast, reaches low worst-case join delays but does not limit the overhead. Contention-Based Multicast Forwarding (CBMF) addresses the problems that appear in highly mobile networks induced by outdated position information. Instead of basing forwarding decisions on a perception that may no longer be up to date, the packets are addressed only to the final destination; no explicit next hops are specified. The receiving nodes, which are candidate next hops, then decide by means of contention which of them are the most suitable next hop(s) for a packet. Not only is the decision made based on the most currently available data, but this procedure also saves the regular sending of beacon messages, thus reducing the overhead. The lack of multicast congestion control is another unsolved problem obstructing high-bandwidth data transmission. Sending out more and more packets to a multicast group lets the performance decrease. Backpressure Multicast Congestion Control (BMCC) takes care that the network does not need to handle more packets than it is able to. It achieves this by limiting the packet queues on the intermediate hops. A forwarder may not forward the next packet of a stream before it has noticed---by overhearing the transmission of the next hop---that the previous packet has succeeded. If there is congestion in an area, backpressure is implicitly built up towards the source, which then stops sending out packets until the congestion is released. BMCC takes care that every receiving node will receive packets at the same rate. An alternative mode of operation, BMCC with Backpressure Pruning (BMCC-BP) allows the cutting of congested branches for single packets, permitting a higher rate for uncongested receivers. Besides presenting protocols for multicast communication in MANETs, this thesis also describes implementations of two of the above-mentioned protocols. The first one is an implementation of SPBM for the Linux kernel that allows IP applications to send data via UDP to a group of receivers in an ad-hoc network. The implementation resides between the MAC layer and the network/IP layer of the network stack. It is compatible with unmodified standard kernels of versions 2.4 and 2.6, and may be compiled for x86 or ARM processor architectures. The second implementation is an implementation of CBMF for the ScatterWeb MSB430 sensor nodes. Due to their low-level programmability they allow an integration of the routing protocol with the medium access control. The absence of periodic beacon messages makes the protocol especially suitable for energy-constrained sensor networks. Furthermore, other constraints like limited memory and computational power demand special consideration as well