Performance modelling and enhancement of wireless communication protocols

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks(WLANs) play a key role in the data communications and networking areas, having witnessed significant research and development. WLANs are extremely popular being almost everywhere including business,office and home deployments.In order to deal with the modem Wireless connectivity needs,the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) has developed the 802.11 standard family utilizing mainly radio transmission techniques, whereas the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) addressed the requirement for multipoint connectivity with the development of the Advanced Infrared(Alr) protocol stack. This work studies the collision avoidance procedures of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol and suggests certain protocol enhancements aiming at maximising performance. A new, elegant and accurate analysis based on Markov chain modelling is developed for the idealistic assumption of unlimited packet retransmissions as well as for the case of finite packet retry limits. Simple equations are derived for the through put efficiency, the average packet delay, the probability of a packet being discarded when it reaches the maximum retransmission limit, the average time to drop such a packet and the packet inter-arrival time for both basic access and RTS/CTS medium access schemes.The accuracy of the mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with OPNET simulation results. An extensive and detailed study is carried out on the influence of performance of physical layer, data rate, packet payload size and several backoff parameters for both medium access mechanisms. The previous mathematical model is extended to take into account transmission errors that can occur either independently with fixed Bit Error Rate(BER) or in bursts. The dependency of the protocol performance on BER and other factors related to independent and burst transmission errors is explored. Furthermore, a simple-implement appropriate tuning of the back off algorithm for maximizing IEEE 802-11 protocol performance is proposed depending on the specific communication requirements. The effectiveness of the RTS/CTS scheme in reducing collision duration at high data rates is studied and an all-purpose expression for the optimal use of the RTS/CTS reservation scheme is derived. Moreover, an easy-to-implement backoff algorithm that significantly enhances performance is introduced and an alternative derivation is developed based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi-dimensional Markov chains. Finally, an additional performance improvement scheme is proposed by employing packet bursting in order to reduce overhead costs such as contention time and RTS/CTSex changes. Fairness is explored in short-time and long-time scales for both the legacy DCF and packet bursting cases. AIr protocol employs the RTS/CTS medium reservation scheme to cope with hidden stations and CSMA/CA techniques with linear contention window (CW) adjustment for medium access. A 1-dimensional Markov chain model is constructed instead of the bi-dimensional model in order to obtain simple mathematical equations of the average packet delay.This new approach greatly simplifies previous analyses and can be applied to any CSMA/CA protocol.The derived mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with simulation results and an extensive Alr packet delay evaluation is carried out by taking into account all the factors and parameters that affect protocol performance. Finally, suitable values for both backoff and protocol parameters are proposed that reduce average packet delay and, thus, maximize performance

Performance modelling and enhancement of wireless communication protocols

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks(WLANs) play a key role in the data communications and networking areas, having witnessed significant research and development. WLANs are extremely popular being almost everywhere including business,office and home deployments.In order to deal with the modem Wireless connectivity needs,the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) has developed the 802.11 standard family utilizing mainly radio transmission techniques, whereas the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) addressed the requirement for multipoint connectivity with the development of the Advanced Infrared(Alr) protocol stack. This work studies the collision avoidance procedures of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol and suggests certain protocol enhancements aiming at maximising performance. A new, elegant and accurate analysis based on Markov chain modelling is developed for the idealistic assumption of unlimited packet retransmissions as well as for the case of finite packet retry limits. Simple equations are derived for the through put efficiency, the average packet delay, the probability of a packet being discarded when it reaches the maximum retransmission limit, the average time to drop such a packet and the packet inter-arrival time for both basic access and RTS/CTS medium access schemes.The accuracy of the mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with OPNET simulation results. An extensive and detailed study is carried out on the influence of performance of physical layer, data rate, packet payload size and several backoff parameters for both medium access mechanisms. The previous mathematical model is extended to take into account transmission errors that can occur either independently with fixed Bit Error Rate(BER) or in bursts. The dependency of the protocol performance on BER and other factors related to independent and burst transmission errors is explored. Furthermore, a simple-implement appropriate tuning of the back off algorithm for maximizing IEEE 802-11 protocol performance is proposed depending on the specific communication requirements. The effectiveness of the RTS/CTS scheme in reducing collision duration at high data rates is studied and an all-purpose expression for the optimal use of the RTS/CTS reservation scheme is derived. Moreover, an easy-to-implement backoff algorithm that significantly enhances performance is introduced and an alternative derivation is developed based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi-dimensional Markov chains. Finally, an additional performance improvement scheme is proposed by employing packet bursting in order to reduce overhead costs such as contention time and RTS/CTSex changes. Fairness is explored in short-time and long-time scales for both the legacy DCF and packet bursting cases. AIr protocol employs the RTS/CTS medium reservation scheme to cope with hidden stations and CSMA/CA techniques with linear contention window (CW) adjustment for medium access. A 1-dimensional Markov chain model is constructed instead of the bi-dimensional model in order to obtain simple mathematical equations of the average packet delay.This new approach greatly simplifies previous analyses and can be applied to any CSMA/CA protocol.The derived mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with simulation results and an extensive Alr packet delay evaluation is carried out by taking into account all the factors and parameters that affect protocol performance. Finally, suitable values for both backoff and protocol parameters are proposed that reduce average packet delay and, thus, maximize performance.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Wireless personal area networks and free-space optical links

This thesis is concerned with the link layer design of indoor (IrDA) and outdoor infrared links, as well as the performance of the higher layers of two major Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technologies: IrDA and Bluetooth. Recent advancesin wireless technology have made it possible to put networking technology into small portable devices. During the past few years, WPAN technologies have been the subject of a tremendous growth both in research and development. Although many studies have been conducted on wireless links to address different issues on physical and link layers, wireless communications are still characterised by high error rates becauseof the frequently changing medium. On the other hand, performance studies of the higher layers are also very important. In this thesis, for the first time, a comprehensivestudy of the interactions betweenthe higher and the lower protocol layers of IrDA and Bluetooth has been carried out to improve the overall system performance. Mathematical models for the link layers are introduced for the infrared systems: infrared data association (IrDA) and free space optics (FSO). A model for the IrDA (indoor infrared) link layer is developed by considering the presence of bit errors. Based on this model, the effect of propagation delay on the link through put is investigated. An optimization study is also carried out to maximize the link throughput. FSO (outdoor infrared) links are often characterized by high speed and long link distance. A mathematical model for the FSO link layer is also developed. Significant improvement of the link throughput is achieved by optimizing the link parameters. Based on the link layer model, the performance of the IrDA higher layers (transport, session and application layers) is investigated. First, a mathematical model of TinyTP (transport protocol) is elaborated and subsequently verified by simulations. The effects of multiple connections and available buffer size are investigated. The throughput at the TinyTP level is optimized for different buffer sizes. Subsequently, the session layer, including Object Exchange (OBEX) and IrDA Burst (IrBurst) protocols, is studied and modelled. The derived mathematical model is verified by simulation results. A set of protocol parameters and hardware selection guidelines is proposed to optimize the overall system performance while also keeping the hardware requirementto a minimum. Finally, two rapidly developing IrDA applications, IrDA financial messaging(IrFM) and IrDA simple connection (IrSC), are studied. IrFM is investigated by comparison to other digital payment technologies, while the performance of IrSC is compared in two different technical approaches. In order to improve the throughput and minimize the transmission delay for the Bluetooth data applications, a systematic analysis is carried out for the Bluetooth Logical Link Control and Adaptation Layer Protocol (L2CAP). L2CAP is layered above the Bluetooth link layer (Baseband) and is essential to Bluetooth data applications. A simple and intuitive mathematical model is developed to derive simple equations for the L2CAP throughput and the average packet delay. The derived throughput equation, which is validated by simulations, takes into account bit errors as well as packet retry limits. Finally, a number of easy-to-implement performance enhancement schemes are proposed, including the optimum use of the protocol parameters

Politiques de robustesse en réseaux ad hoc

Les réseaux sans fil sont sujets à des perturbations voire des pannes de liens et de noeuds en raison des caractéristiques intrinsèques de leur support de communication ; ces pannes sont aggravées par les particularités de relayage et de mobilité des noeuds dans les réseaux ad hoc. Ces réseaux requièrent donc la conception et la mise oeuvre des protocoles robustes au niveau de toutes les couches protocolaires. Dans cette thèse, nous choisissons une approche de robustesse pour améliorer les performances des communications dans un réseau mobile ad hoc. Nous proposons et étudions deux architectures de protection (protection par une analyse prédictive et protection par redondance de routes) qui sont couplées avec une restauration de niveau routage. Concernant la phase de détection, le protocole de routage utilise les notifications de niveau liaison pour détecter les pannes de liens. La première solution repose sur un protocole de routage réactif unipath dont le critère de sélection de routes est modifié. L’idée est d’utiliser des métriques capables de prédire l’état futur des routes dans le but d’améliorer leur durée de vie. Pour cela, deux métriques prédictives reposant sur la mobilité des noeuds sont proposées : la fiabilité des routes et une combinaison fiabilité-minimum de sauts. Pour calculer ces métriques prédictives, nous proposons une méthode analytique de calcul de la fiabilité de liens entre noeuds. Cette méthode prend compte le modèle de mobilité des noeuds et les caractéristiques de la communication sans fil notamment les collisions inter-paquets et les atténuations du signal. Les modèles de mobilité étudiés sont les modèles Random Walk et Random Way Point. Nous montrons l’impact de ces métriques sur les performances en termes de taux de livraison de paquets, de surcoût normalisé et de ruptures de routes. La seconde solution est une protection par redondance de routes qui s’appuie sur un protocole de routage multipath. Dans cette architecture, l’opération de recouvrement consiste soit à un basculement sur une route secondaire soit à une nouvelle découverte. Nous montrons que la redondance de routes améliore la robustesse de la communication en réduisant le temps de restauration. Ensuite, nous proposons une comparaison analytique entre les différentes politiques de recouvrement d’un protocole multipath. Nous en deduisons qu’un recouvrement segmenté donne les meilleurs résultats en termes de temps de restauration et de fiabilité. ABSTRACT : Due to the unreliability characteristics of wireless communications, and nodes mobility, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) suffer from frequent failures and reactivation of links. Consequently, the routes frequently change, causing significant number of routing packets to discover new routes, leading to increased network congestion and transmission latency. Therefore, MANETs demand robust protocol design at all layers of the communication protocol stack, particularly at the MAC, the routing and transport layers. In this thesis, we adopt robustness approach to improve communication performance in MANET. We propose and study two protection architectures (protection by predictive analysis and protection by routes redundancy) which are coupled with a routing level restoration. The routing protocol is responsible of the failure detection phase, and uses the mechanism of link-level notifications to detect link failures. Our first proposition is based on unipath reactive routing protocol with a modified route selection criterion. The idea is to use metrics that can predict the future state of the route in order to improve their lifetime. Two predictive metrics based on the mobility of nodes are proposed : the routes reliability and, combining hop-count and reliability metrics. In order to determine the two predictive metrics, we propose an analytical formulation that computes link reliability between adjacent nodes. This formulation takes into account nodes mobility model and the the wireless communication characteristics including the collisions between packets and signal attenuations. Nodes mobility models studied are Random Walk and Random Way Point. We show the impact of these predictive metrics on the networks performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, normalized routing overhead and number of route failures. The second proposition is based on multipath routing protocol. It is a protection mechanism based on route redundancy. In this architecture, the recovery operation is either to switch the traffic to alternate route or to compute a new route. We show that the routes redundancy technique improves the communication robustness by reducing the failure recovery time. We propose an analytical comparison between different recovery policies of multipath routing protocol. We deduce that segment recovery is the best recovery policy in terms of recovery time and reliability

Politiques de robustesse en réseaux ad hoc

Les réseaux sans fil sont sujets à des perturbations voire des pannes de liens et de noeuds en raison des caractéristiques intrinsèques de leur support de communication ; ces pannes sont aggravées par les particularités de relayage et de mobilité des noeuds dans les réseaux ad hoc. Ces réseaux requièrent donc la conception et la mise oeuvre des protocoles robustes au niveau de toutes les couches protocolaires. Dans cette thèse, nous choisissons une approche de robustesse pour améliorer les performances des communications dans un réseau mobile ad hoc. Nous proposons et étudions deux architectures de protection (protection par une analyse prédictive et protection par redondance de routes) qui sont couplées avec une restauration de niveau routage. Concernant la phase de détection, le protocole de routage utilise les notifications de niveau liaison pour détecter les pannes de liens. La première solution repose sur un protocole de routage réactif unipath dont le critère de sélection de routes est modifié. L idée est d utiliser des métriques capables de prédire l état futur des routes dans le but d améliorer leur durée de vie. Pour cela, deux métriques prédictives reposant sur la mobilité des noeuds sont proposées : la fiabilité des routes et une combinaison fiabilité-minimum de sauts. Pour calculer ces métriques prédictives, nous proposons une méthode analytique de calcul de la fiabilité de liens entre noeuds. Cette méthode prend compte le modèle de mobilité des noeuds et les caractéristiques de la communication sans fil notamment les collisions inter-paquets et les atténuations du signal. Les modèles de mobilité étudiés sont les modèles Random Walk et Random Way Point. Nous montrons l impact de ces métriques sur les performances en termes de taux de livraison de paquets, de surcoût normalisé et de ruptures de routes. La seconde solution est une protection par redondance de routes qui s appuie sur un protocole de routage multipath. Dans cette architecture, l opération de recouvrement consiste soit à un basculement sur une route secondaire soit à une nouvelle découverte. Nous montrons que la redondance de routes améliore la robustesse de la communication en réduisant le temps de restauration. Ensuite, nous proposons une comparaison analytique entre les différentes politiques de recouvrement d un protocole multipath. Nous en deduisons qu un recouvrement segmenté donne les meilleurs résultats en termes de temps de restauration et de fiabilitéDue to the unreliability characteristics of wireless communications, and nodes mobility, Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) suffer from frequent failures and reactivation of links. Consequently, the routes frequently change, causing significant number of routing packets to discover new routes, leading to increased network congestion and transmission latency. Therefore, MANETs demand robust protocol design at all layers of the communication protocol stack, particularly at the MAC, the routing and transport layers. In this thesis, we adopt robustness approach to improve communication performance in MANET. We propose and study two protection architectures (protection by predictive analysis and protection by routes redundancy) which are coupled with a routing level restoration. The routing protocol is responsible of the failure detection phase, and uses the mechanism of link-level notifications to detect link failures. Our first proposition is based on unipath reactive routing protocol with a modified route selection criterion. The idea is to use metrics that can predict the future state of the route in order to improve their lifetime. Two predictive metrics based on the mobility of nodes are proposed : the routes reliability and, combining hop-count and reliability metrics. In order to determine the two predictive metrics, we propose an analytical formulation that computes link reliability between adjacent nodes. This formulation takes into account nodes mobility model and the the wireless communication characteristics including the collisions between packets and signal attenuations. Nodes mobility models studied are Random Walk and Random Way Point. We show the impact of these predictive metrics on the networks performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, normalized routing overhead and number of route failures. The second proposition is based on multipath routing protocol. It is a protection mechanism based on route redundancy. In this architecture, the recovery operation is either to switch the traffic to alternate route or to compute a new route. We show that the routes redundancy technique improves the communication robustness by reducing the failure recovery time. We propose an analytical comparison between different recovery policies of multipath routing protocol. We deduce that segment recovery is the best recovery policy in terms of recovery time and reliabilityTOULOUSE-INP (315552154) / SudocSudocFranceF

Wireless personal area networks and free-space optical links

This thesis is concerned with the link layer design of indoor (IrDA) and outdoor infrared links, as well as the performance of the higher layers of two major Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technologies: IrDA and Bluetooth. Recent advancesin wireless technology have made it possible to put networking technology into small portable devices. During the past few years, WPAN technologies have been the subject of a tremendous growth both in research and development. Although many studies have been conducted on wireless links to address different issues on physical and link layers, wireless communications are still characterised by high error rates becauseof the frequently changing medium. On the other hand, performance studies of the higher layers are also very important. In this thesis, for the first time, a comprehensivestudy of the interactions betweenthe higher and the lower protocol layers of IrDA and Bluetooth has been carried out to improve the overall system performance. Mathematical models for the link layers are introduced for the infrared systems: infrared data association (IrDA) and free space optics (FSO). A model for the IrDA (indoor infrared) link layer is developed by considering the presence of bit errors. Based on this model, the effect of propagation delay on the link through put is investigated. An optimization study is also carried out to maximize the link throughput. FSO (outdoor infrared) links are often characterized by high speed and long link distance. A mathematical model for the FSO link layer is also developed. Significant improvement of the link throughput is achieved by optimizing the link parameters. Based on the link layer model, the performance of the IrDA higher layers (transport, session and application layers) is investigated. First, a mathematical model of TinyTP (transport protocol) is elaborated and subsequently verified by simulations. The effects of multiple connections and available buffer size are investigated. The throughput at the TinyTP level is optimized for different buffer sizes. Subsequently, the session layer, including Object Exchange (OBEX) and IrDA Burst (IrBurst) protocols, is studied and modelled. The derived mathematical model is verified by simulation results. A set of protocol parameters and hardware selection guidelines is proposed to optimize the overall system performance while also keeping the hardware requirementto a minimum. Finally, two rapidly developing IrDA applications, IrDA financial messaging(IrFM) and IrDA simple connection (IrSC), are studied. IrFM is investigated by comparison to other digital payment technologies, while the performance of IrSC is compared in two different technical approaches. In order to improve the throughput and minimize the transmission delay for the Bluetooth data applications, a systematic analysis is carried out for the Bluetooth Logical Link Control and Adaptation Layer Protocol (L2CAP). L2CAP is layered above the Bluetooth link layer (Baseband) and is essential to Bluetooth data applications. A simple and intuitive mathematical model is developed to derive simple equations for the L2CAP throughput and the average packet delay. The derived throughput equation, which is validated by simulations, takes into account bit errors as well as packet retry limits. Finally, a number of easy-to-implement performance enhancement schemes are proposed, including the optimum use of the protocol parameters.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo