Adaptive EDCF: Enhanced service differentiation for IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks

This paper describes an adaptive service differentiation scheme for QoS enhancement in IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks. Our approach, called adaptive enhanced distributed coordination function (AEDCF), is derived from the new EDCF introduced in the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard. Our scheme aims to share the transmission channel efficiently. Relative priorities are provisioned by adjusting the size of the contention window (CW) of each traffic class taking into account both applications requirements and network conditions. We evaluate through simulations the performance of AEDCF and compare it with the EDCF scheme proposed in the 802.11e. Results show that AEDCF outperforms the basic EDCF, especially at high traffic load conditions. Indeed, our scheme increases the medium utilization ratio and reduces for more than 50% the collision rate. While achieving delay differentiation, the overall goodput obtained is up to 25% higher than EDCF. Moreover, the complexity of AEDCF remains similar to the EDCF scheme, enabling the design of cheap implementations

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

Loss Diagnosis and Indoor Position Location System based on IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) have been widely deployed to provide short range broadband communications. Due to the fast evolvement of IEEE 802.11 based WLAN standards and various relevant applications, many research efforts have been focused on the optimization of WLAN data rate, power and channel utilization efficiency. On the other hand, many emerging applications based on WLANs have been introduced. Indoor position location (IPL) system is one of such applications which turns IEEE 802.11 from a wireless communications infrastructure into a position location network. This thesis mainly focuses on data transmission rate enhancement techniques and the development of IEEE 802.11 WLAN based IPL system with improved locationing accuracy. In IEEE 802.11 systems, rate adaptation algorithms (RAAs) are employed to improve transmission efficiency by choosing an appropriate modulation and coding scheme accord­ ing to point-to-point channel conditions. However, due to the resource-sharing nature of WLANs, co-channel interferences and frame collisions cannot be avoided, which further complicates the wireless environment and makes the RAA design a more challenging task. As WLAN performance depends on many dynamic factors such as multipath fading and co-channel interferences, differentiating the cause of performance degradation such as frame losses, which is known as loss diagnosis techniques, is essential for performance enhance­ ments of existing rate adaptation schemes. In this thesis, we propose a fast and reliable collision detection scheme for frame loss diagnosis in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. Collisions are detected by tracking changes of the signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) in IEEE 802.11 WLANs with a nonparametric order-based cumulative sum (CUSUM) algorithm for rapid loss diagnosis. Numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed collision detection scheme. The other aspect of this thesis is the investigation of an IEEE 802.11 WLAN based IPL system. WLAN based IPL systems have received increasing attentions due to their variety of potential applications. Instead of relying on dedicated locationing networks and devices, IEEE 802.11 WLAN based IPL systems utilize widely deployed IEEE 802.11 WLAN infrastructures and standardized wireless stations to determine the position of a target station in indoor environments. iii Abstract In this thesis, a WLAN protocol-based distance measurement technique is investigated, which takes advantages of existing IEEE 802.11 data/ACK frame exchange sequences. In the proposed distance measurement technique, neither dedicated hardware nor hardware modifications is required. Thus it can be easily integrated into off-the-shelf commercial, inexpensive WLAN stations for IPL system implementation. Field test results confirm the efficacy of the proposed protocol-based distance measurement technique. Furthermore, a preliminary IPL system based on the proposed method is also developed to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed technique in realistic indoor wireless environments

Arbitrating Traffic Contention for Power Saving with Multiple PSM Clients

Data transmission over WiFi quickly drains the batteries of mobile devices. Although the IEEE 802.11 standards provide power save mode (PSM) to help mobile devices conserve energy, PSM fails to bring expected benefits in many real scenarios. In particular, when multiple PSM mobile devices associate to a single access point (AP), PSM does not work well under transmission contention. Optimizing power saving of multiple PSM clients is a challenging task, because each PSM client expects to complete data transmission early so that it can turn to low power mode. In this paper, we define an energy conserving model to describe the general PSM traffic contention problem. We prove that the optimization of energy saving for multiple PSM clients under constraint is an NPcomplete problem. Following this direction, we propose a solution called harmonious power saving mechanism (HPSM) to address one specific case, in which multiple PSM clients associate to a single AP. In HPSM, we first use a basic sociological concept to define the richness of a PSM client based on the link resource it consumes. Then, we separate these poor PSM clients from rich PSM clients in terms of link resource consumption and favor the former to save power when they face PSM transmission contention. We implement prototypes of HPSM based on the open source projects Mad-wifi and NS-2. Our evaluations show that HPSM can help the poor PSM clients effectively save power while only slightly degrading the rich PSM clients\u27 performance in comparison with the existing PSM solutions

A Dynamic Multimedia User-Weight Classification Scheme for IEEE_802.11 WLANs

In this paper we expose a dynamic traffic-classification scheme to support multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Obviously, over a Wi-Fi link and to better serve these applications - which normally have strict bounded transmission delay or minimum link rate requirement - a service differentiation technique can be applied to the media traffic transmitted by the same mobile node using the well-known 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol. However, the given EDCA mode does not offer user differentiation, which can be viewed as a deficiency in multi-access wireless networks. Accordingly, we propose a new inter-node priority access scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks which is compatible with the EDCA scheme. The proposed scheme joins a dynamic user-weight to each mobile station depending on its outgoing data, and therefore deploys inter-node priority for the channel access to complement the existing EDCA inter-frame priority. This provides efficient quality of service control across multiple users within the same coverage area of an access point. We provide performance evaluations to compare the proposed access model with the basic EDCA 802.11 MAC protocol mode to elucidate the quality improvement achieved for multimedia communication over 802.11 WLANs.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC

Analysis and Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11 WLAN

With fast deployment of wireless local area networks VoIP over IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is growing very fast and is providing a cost effective alternative for voice communications. WLANs were initially set up to handle bursty nonreal time type of data traffic. Therefore, the wireless access protocols initially defined are not suitable for voice traffic. Subsequently, updates in the standard have been made to provision for QoS requirements of data, especially the real time traffic of the type voice and video. Despite these updates, however, transmitting voice traffic over WLAN does not utilize the available bandwidth (BW) efficiently, and the number of simultaneous calls supported in practice is significantly lower than what the BW figures would suggest. Several modifications have been proposed to improve the call capacity, and recently isochronous coordination function (ICF) was introduced to mitigate the problem of low call capacity. The proposed modified ICF which further improves the performance in terms of the call capacity. The proposed scheme uses multiplexing and multicasting in the downlink to substantially increase the call capacity