Performance improvements to the 802.11 wireless network medium access control sub-layer : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering at Massey University

This thesis presents the outcome into the research and development of improvements to the 802.11 wireless networking medium access control (MAC) sublayer. The main products of the research are three types of improvement that increase the efficiency and throughput of the 802.11 protocol. Beginning with an overview of the original 802.11 physical layer and MAC sub-layer standard, the introductory chapters then cover the many supplements to the original standard (including a brief on the future 802.11n supplement). The current state of the 802.11 MAC sub-layer is presented along with an assessment of the realistic performance available from 802.11. Lastly, the motivations for improving the MAC sub-layer are explained along with a summary of existing research into this area. The main improvement presented within the thesis is that of packet aggregation. The operation of aggregation is explained in detail, along with the reasons for the significant available throughput increase to 802.11 from aggregation. Aggregation is then developed to produce even higher throughput, and to be a more robust mechanism. Additionally, aggregation is formally described in the form of an update to the existing 802.11 standard. Following this, two more improvements are shown that can be used either with or without the aggregation mechanism. Stored frame headers are designed to reduce repetition of control data, and combined acknowledgements are an expansion of the block acknowledgement system introduced in the 802.11e supplement. This is followed by a description of the simulation environment used to test the three improvements presented, such as the settings used and metrics created. The results of the simulations of the improvements are presented along with the discussion. The developments to the basic improvements are also simulated and discussed in the same way. Finally, conclusions about the improvements detailed and the results shown in the simulations are drawn. Also at the end of the thesis, the possible future direction of research into the improvements is given, as well as the aspects and issues of implementing aggregation on a personal computer based platform

Design and Implementation of Distributed Resource Management Mechanisms for Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper we design and implement a resource management scheme based on cooperative association, where the STAs can share useful information in order to improve the performance of the association/handoff procedures. The cooperative association mechanism is inspired by the rapidly designed cooperative protocols in the field of wireless networks. Furthermore, we introduce a load balancing mechanism that operates in a cross-layer manner taking into account uplink and downlink channel conditions, routing performance and congestion control. The iterative heuristic algorithms that we propose, control the communication load of each mesh AP in a distributed manner. We evaluate the performance of our mechanisms through OPNET simulations and testbed experiments

Effective Bandwidth Utilization in IEEE802.11 for VOIP

Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is one of the most important applications for the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs). For network planners who are deploying VoIP over WLANs, one of the important issues is the VoIP capacity. VoIP bandwidth consumption over a WAN is one of the most important factors to consider when building a VoIP infrastructure. Failure to account for VoIP bandwidth requirements will severely limit the reliability of a VoIP system and place a huge burden on the WAN infrastructure. Less bandwidth utilization is the key reasons for reduced number of channel accesses in VOIP. But in the QoS point of view the free bandwidth of atleast 1-5% will improve the voice quality. This proposal utilizes the maximum bandwidth by leaving 1-5% free bandwidth. A Bandwidth Data rate Moderation (BDM) algorithm has been proposed which correlates the data rate specified in IEEE802.11b with the free bandwidth. At each time BDM will calculate the bandwidth utilization before sending the packet to improve performance and voice quality of VoIP. The bandwidth calculation in BDM can be done by using Erlang and VOIP bandwidth calculator. Finally, ns2 experimental study shows the relationship between bandwidth utilization, free bandwidth and data rate. The paper concludes that marginal VoIP call rate has been increased by BDM algorithm.Comment: IEEE Publication format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS, Vol. 8 No. 1, April 2010, USA. ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

Token-DCF: An Opportunistic MAC protocol for Wireless Networks

IEEE 802.11 DCF is the MAC protocol currently used in wireless LANs. 802.11 DCF is inefficient due to two types of overhead; channel idle time and collision time. This paper presents the design and performance evaluation of an efficient MAC protocol for wireless networks, called Token-DCF. Token-DCF decreases both idle time and collision time. In Token-DCF, each station keeps track of neighboring links' queue length by overhearing of transmitted packets on the wireless medium. The result is then used to assign privileges to the network stations. A privileged station does not follow the backoff mechanism and transmits immediately after the channel is sensed idle. Our simulation results show that Token-DCF can significantly improve channel utilization, system throughput and channel access delay over 802.11 DCF

Throughput optimization strategies for large-scale wireless LANs

Thanks to the active development of IEEE 802.11, the performance of wireless local area networks (WLANs) is improving by every new edition of the standard facilitating large enterprises to rely on Wi-Fi for more demanding applications. The limited number of channels in the unlicensed industrial scientific medical frequency band however is one of the key bottlenecks of Wi-Fi when scalability and robustness are points of concern. In this paper we propose two strategies for the optimization of throughput in wireless LANs: a heuristic derived from a theoretical model and a surrogate model based decision engine

Improved IEEE 802.11 point coordination function considering fiber-delay difference in distributed antenna systems

In this paper, we present an improved IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area network (WLAN) medium access control (MAC) mechanism for simulcast radio-over-fiber-based distributed antenna systems where multiple remote antenna units (RAUs) are connected to one access point (AP). In the improved mechanism, the fiber delay between RAUs and central unit is taken into account in a modification to the conventional point coordination function (PCF) that achieves coordination by a centralized algorithm. Simulation results show that the improved PCF outperforms the distributed coordination function (DCF) in both the basic-access and request/clear-to-send modes in terms of the total throughput and the fairness among RAU

An Algorithm to Improve Performance over Multihop Wireless Mesh Network

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the dominant reliable transport protocol utilized in the Internet. Improving the performance of TCP associated with the presence of multi-hop is one of the research challenges in wireless mesh networks. Wireless mesh networks have large round trip time variations and these variations are dependent on the number of hops. In wireless mesh network, when congestion loss and wireless loss are co-existed the number of packets dropped increases and will have adverse effects on TCP and its congestion control mechanism which leads to low throughput. Here we have designed a new TCP scheme for multi-hop wireless mesh networks, by modifying the sender side congestion control functionality of TCP NewReno, which is tuned towards improving the performance of TCP. The simulation results show that TCP SAC has higher performance than TCP NewReno, Reno, Sack and Vegas in multi-hop wireless mesh networks.Comment: Pages: 05 Figures: 0

CSMA/CA Bottleneck Remediation in Saturation Mode with New Backoff Strategy

Many modern wireless networks integrate carrier sense mul-tiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) with exponential backoff as medium access control (MAC) technique. In order to decrease the MAC overhead and the collision probability, we propose in this paper a new backoff strategy leading to better saturation throughput and access de-lay performance comparing to the classical protocol. We investigate the CSMA/CA with RTS/CTS technique, and we show that our strategy reaches better saturation throughput and access delay especially in dense networks. This proposed strategy distributes users over all the backoff stages to solve the bottleneck problem present in the first backoff stage. Finally, we analyze our strategy and we compare it to the classical one modeled by Markov chain. Analytical and simulation results show the improvment in term of saturation throughput. Cumulative density func-tion (CDF) of the access delay illustrates the important gain obtained by the proposed strategy

μ\muNap: Practical Micro-Sleeps for 802.11 WLANs

In this paper, we revisit the idea of putting interfaces to sleep during 'packet overhearing' (i.e., when there are ongoing transmissions addressed to other stations) from a practical standpoint. To this aim, we perform a robust experimental characterisation of the timing and consumption behaviour of a commercial 802.11 card. We design $\mu$Nap, a local standard-compliant energy-saving mechanism that leverages micro-sleep opportunities inherent to the CSMA operation of 802.11 WLANs. This mechanism is backwards compatible and incrementally deployable, and takes into account the timing limitations of existing hardware, as well as practical CSMA-related issues (e.g., capture effect). According to the performance assessment carried out through trace-based simulation, the use of our scheme would result in a 57% reduction in the time spent in overhearing, thus leading to an energy saving of 15.8% of the activity time.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure

Dynamic Sounding for Multi-User MIMO in Wireless LANs

Consumer electronic (CE) devices increasingly rely on wireless local area networks (WLANs). Next generation WLANs will continue to exploit multiple antenna systems to satisfy the growing need for WLAN system capacity. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna systems improve the spectral efficiency and single user throughput. Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems exploit the spatial separation of users for increasing the sum-throughput. In an MU-MIMO system, efficient channel sounding is essential for achieving optimal performance. The system analysis in this paper provides insights into the rate at which to perform channel sounding. This paper shows that optimal sounding intervals exist for single user transmit beamforming (SU-TxBF) and MU-MIMO, and proposes a low-complexity dynamic sounding approach for practical MU-MIMO WLAN deployments. The proposed approach adjusts the sounding interval adaptively based on the real-time learning outcomes in the given radio environment. Using real over-the-air channel measurements, significant throughput improvements (up to 31.8%) are demonstrated by adopting the proposed dynamic sounding approach, which is compliant with IEEE 802.11ac.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 201