Future Evolution of CSMA Protocols for the IEEE 802.11 Standard

In this paper a candidate protocol to replace the prevalent CSMA/CA medium access control in Wireless Local Area Networks is presented. The proposed protocol can achieve higher throughput than CSMA/CA, while maintaining fairness, and without additional implementation complexity. Under certain circumstances, it is able to reach and maintain collision-free operation, even when the number of contenders is variable and potentially large. It is backward compatible, allowing for new and legacy stations to coexist without degrading one another's performance, a property that can make the adoption process by future versions of the standard smooth and inexpensive.Comment: This paper has been accepted in the Second IEEE ICC Workshop 2013 on Telecommunication Standards: From Research to Standard

Rate adaptive resource allocation with fairness control for OFDMA networks

The use of opportunistic radio resource allocation techniques in order to efficiently manage the resources generates a low fairness among the users in a cellular system due to uneven Quality of Service (QoS) distribution. Some classic rate adaptive policies tried to tackle this problem for OFDMA systems by proposing solutions to maximize capacity, maximize fairness, or find a static trade-off between these two objectives. This work generalizes these classic policies and propose a dynamic fairness/rate adaptive technique based on dynamic sub-carrier assignment and equal power allocation that considers a new fairness constraint in the optimization problem. By means of extensive system-level simulations, it is demonstrated that the proposed technique is able to provide an instantaneous (short-term) fairness control, which provides to the network operator the flexibility to operate on any desired trade-off point.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version