Energy Efficient and Cooperative Solutions for Next-Generation Wireless Networks

Energy efficiency is increasingly important for next-generation wireless systems due to the limited battery resources of mobile clients. While fourth generation cellular standards emphasize low client battery consumption, existing techniques do not explicitly focus on reducing power that is consumed when a client is actively communicating with the network. Based on high data rate demands of modern multimedia applications, active mode power consumption is expected to become a critical consideration for the development and deployment of future wireless technologies. Another reason for focusing more attention on energy efficient studies is given by the relatively slow progress in battery technology and the growing quality of service requirements of multimedia applications. The disproportion between demanded and available battery capacity is becoming especially significant for small-scale mobile client devices, where wireless power consumption dominates within the total device power budget. To compensate for this growing gap, aggressive improvements in all aspects of wireless system design are necessary. Recent work in this area indicates that joint link adaptation and resource allocation techniques optimizing energy efficient metrics can provide a considerable gain in client power consumption. Consequently, it is crucial to adapt state-of-the-art energy efficient approaches for practical use, as well as to illustrate the pros and cons associated with applying power-bandwidth optimization to improve client energy efficiency and develop insights for future research in this area. This constitutes the first objective of the present research. Together with energy efficiency, next-generation cellular technologies are emphasizing stronger support for heterogeneous multimedia applications. Since the integration of diverse services within a single radio platform is expected to result in higher operator profits and, at the same time, reduce network management expenses, intensive research efforts have been invested into design principles of such networks. However, as wireless resources are limited and shared by clients, service integration may become challenging. A key element in such systems is the packet scheduler, which typically helps ensure that the individual quality of service requirements of wireless clients are satisfied. In contrastingly different distributed wireless environments, random multiple access protocols are beginning to provide mechanisms for statistical quality of service assurance. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive analytical frameworks which allow reliable control of the quality of service parameters for both cellular and local area networks. Providing such frameworks is therefore the second objective of this thesis. Additionally, the study addresses the simultaneous operation of a cellular and a local area network in spectrally intense metropolitan deployments and solves some related problems. Further improving the performance of battery-driven mobile clients, cooperative communications are sought as a promising and practical concept. In particular, they are capable of mitigating the negative effects of fading in a wireless channel and are thus expected to enhance next-generation cellular networks in terms of client spectral and energy efficiencies. At the cell edges or in areas missing any supportive relaying infrastructure, client-based cooperative techniques are becoming even more important. As such, a mobile client with poor channel quality may take advantage of neighboring clients which would relay data on its behalf. The key idea behind the concept of client relay is to provide flexible and distributed control over cooperative communications by the wireless clients themselves. By contrast to fully centralized control, this is expected to minimize overhead protocol signaling and hence ensure simpler implementation. Compared to infrastructure relay, client relay will also be cheaper to deploy. Developing the novel concept of client relay, proposing simple and feasible cooperation protocols, and analyzing the basic trade-offs behind client relay functionality become the third objective of this research. Envisioning the evolution of cellular technologies beyond their fourth generation, it appears important to study a wireless network capable of supporting machine-to-machine applications. Recent standardization documents cover a plethora of machine-to-machine use cases, as they also outline the respective technical requirements and features according to the application or network environment. As follows from this activity, a smart grid is one of the primary machine-to-machine use cases that involves meters autonomously reporting usage and alarm information to the grid infrastructure to help reduce operational cost, as well as regulate a customer's utility usage. The preliminary analysis of the reference smart grid scenario indicates weak system architecture components. For instance, the large population of machine-to-machine devices may connect nearly simultaneously to the wireless infrastructure and, consequently, suffer from excessive network entry delays. Another concern is the performance of cell-edge machine-to-machine devices with weak wireless links. Therefore, mitigating the above architecture vulnerabilities and improving the performance of future smart grid deployments is the fourth objective of this thesis. Summarizing, this thesis is generally aimed at the improvement of energy efficient properties of mobile devices in next-generation wireless networks. The related research also embraces a novel cooperation technique where clients may assist each other to increase per-client and network-wide performance. Applying the proposed solutions, the operation time of mobile clients without recharging may be increased dramatically. Our approach incorporates both analytical and simulation components to evaluate complex interactions between the studied objectives. It brings important conclusions about energy efficient and cooperative client behaviors, which is crucial for further development of wireless communications technologies

Design of Media Access Control Schemes for Performance Enhancement of Future Generation Wireless Systems

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) now provide connectivity to many businesses, homes and educational institutions. The wireless channel itself is plagued with numerous problems, such as it does not natively allow sharing of the wireless resource. WLAN devices utilize a complex medium access control (MAC) mechanism to allow multiple users to share the wireless resource. The distributed coordination function (DCF) is the most commonly used multiple access scheme in WLANs and a member of the 802.11 standard [1]. In this thesis, two major roles of MAC protocols are examined: maximizing network throughput and service differentiation. Firstly, a novel MAC scheme is proposed that makes use of Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology to improve overall network throughput. The proposed MIMO-Aware MAC (MA-MAC) scheme utilizes the beamforming feature available in MIMO systems to allow two simultaneous transmissions of the wireless channel overlapped in time. This results in increased aggregate network throughput. This proposed scheme is shown to offer better throughput and delay performance versus existing MAC schemes proposed for simultaneous transmission. In addition, this MAC scheme is able to achieve this performance in a manner compatible with the existing standard. The latter part of this thesis proposes a new Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based scheme for providing video, voice and data services (also known as the Triple-Play services) in a point-to-multipoint network. By dynamically allocating transmission slots, the proposed Television TDMA (TV-TDMA) scheme is shown to better meet delay requirements for video and voice traffic, and is able to achieve higher overall saturation throughput for best-effort traffic than existing Quality of Service enabled protocols

Design of Media Access Control Schemes for Performance Enhancement of Future Generation Wireless Systems

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) now provide connectivity to many businesses, homes and educational institutions. The wireless channel itself is plagued with numerous problems, such as it does not natively allow sharing of the wireless resource. WLAN devices utilize a complex medium access control (MAC) mechanism to allow multiple users to share the wireless resource. The distributed coordination function (DCF) is the most commonly used multiple access scheme in WLANs and a member of the 802.11 standard [1]. In this thesis, two major roles of MAC protocols are examined: maximizing network throughput and service differentiation. Firstly, a novel MAC scheme is proposed that makes use of Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology to improve overall network throughput. The proposed MIMO-Aware MAC (MA-MAC) scheme utilizes the beamforming feature available in MIMO systems to allow two simultaneous transmissions of the wireless channel overlapped in time. This results in increased aggregate network throughput. This proposed scheme is shown to offer better throughput and delay performance versus existing MAC schemes proposed for simultaneous transmission. In addition, this MAC scheme is able to achieve this performance in a manner compatible with the existing standard. The latter part of this thesis proposes a new Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based scheme for providing video, voice and data services (also known as the Triple-Play services) in a point-to-multipoint network. By dynamically allocating transmission slots, the proposed Television TDMA (TV-TDMA) scheme is shown to better meet delay requirements for video and voice traffic, and is able to achieve higher overall saturation throughput for best-effort traffic than existing Quality of Service enabled protocols

Design of Media Access Control Schemes for Performance Enhancement of Future Generation Wireless Systems

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) now provide connectivity to many businesses, homes and educational institutions. The wireless channel itself is plagued with numerous problems, such as it does not natively allow sharing of the wireless resource. WLAN devices utilize a complex medium access control (MAC) mechanism to allow multiple users to share the wireless resource. The distributed coordination function (DCF) is the most commonly used multiple access scheme in WLANs and a member of the 802.11 standard [1]. In this thesis, two major roles of MAC protocols are examined: maximizing network throughput and service differentiation. Firstly, a novel MAC scheme is proposed that makes use of Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology to improve overall network throughput. The proposed MIMO-A ware MAC (MA-MAC) scheme utilizes the beamforming feature available in MIMO systems to allow two simultaneous transmissions of the wireless channel overlapped in time. This results in increased aggregate network throughput. This proposed scheme is shown to offer better throughput and delay performance versus existing MAC schemes proposed for simultaneous transmission. In addition, this MAC scheme is able to achieve this performance in a manner compatible with the existing standard. The latter part of this thesis proposes a new Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based scheme for providing video, voice and data services (also known as the Triple-Play services) in a point-to-multipoint network. By dynamically allocating transmission slots, the proposed Television TDMA (TV-TDMA) scheme is shown to better meet delay requirements for video and voice traffic, and is able to achieve higher overall saturation throughput for best-effort traffic than existing Quality of Service enabled protocols

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

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

Performance Modeling and Analysis of Wireless Local Area Networks with Bursty Traffic

The explosive increase in the use of mobile digital devices has posed great challenges in the design and implementation of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Ever-increasing demands for high-speed and ubiquitous digital communication have made WLANs an essential feature of everyday life. With audio and video forming the highest percentage of traffic generated by multimedia applications, a huge demand is placed for high speed WLANs that provide high Quality-of-Service (QoS) and can satisfy end user’s needs at a relatively low cost. Providing video and audio contents to end users at a satisfactory level with various channel quality and current battery capacities requires thorough studies on the properties of such traffic. In this regard, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol of the 802.11 standard plays a vital role in the management and coordination of shared channel access and data transmission. Therefore, this research focuses on developing new efficient analytical models that evaluate the performance of WLANs and the MAC protocol in the presence of bursty, correlated and heterogeneous multimedia traffic using Batch Markovian Arrival Process (BMAP). BMAP can model the correlation between different packet size distributions and traffic rates while accurately modelling aggregated traffic which often possesses negative statistical properties. The research starts with developing an accurate traffic generator using BMAP to capture the existing correlations in multimedia traffics. For validation, the developed traffic generator is used as an arrival process to a queueing model and is analyzed based on average queue length and mean waiting time. The performance of BMAP/M/1 queue is studied under various number of states and maximum batch sizes of BMAP. The results clearly indicate that any increase in the number of states of the underlying Markov Chain of BMAP or maximum batch size, lead to higher burstiness and correlation of the arrival process, prompting the speed of the queue towards saturation. The developed traffic generator is then used to model traffic sources in IEEE 802.11 WLANs, measuring important QoS metrics of throughput, end-to-end delay, frame loss probability and energy consumption. Performance comparisons are conducted on WLANs under the influence of multimedia traffics modelled as BMAP, Markov Modulated Poisson Process and Poisson Process. The results clearly indicate that bursty traffics generated by BMAP demote network performance faster than other traffic sources under moderate to high loads. The model is also used to study WLANs with unsaturated, heterogeneous and bursty traffic sources. The effects of traffic load and network size on the performance of WLANs are investigated to demonstrate the importance of burstiness and heterogeneity of traffic on accurate evaluation of MAC protocol in wireless multimedia networks. The results of the thesis highlight the importance of taking into account the true characteristics of multimedia traffics for accurate evaluation of the MAC protocol in the design and analysis of wireless multimedia networks and technologies

Analysis and improvement of medium access control protocols in wireless networks. Performance modelling and Quality-of-Service enhancement of IEEE 802.11e MAC in wireless local area networks under heterogeneous multimedia traffic.

In order to efficiently utilize the scarce wireless resource as well as keep up with the ever-increasing demand for Quality-of-Service (QoS) of multimedia applications, wireless networks are undergoing rapid development and dramatic changes in the underlying technologies and protocols. The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, which coordinates the channel access and data transmission of wireless stations, plays a pivotal role in wireless networks. Performance modelling and analysis has been and continues to be of great theoretical and practical importance in the design and development of wireless networks. This research is devoted to developing efficient and cost-effective analytical tools for the performance analysis and enhancement of MAC protocols in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) under heterogeneous multimedia traffic. To support the MAC-layer QoS in WLANs, the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol has proposed three QoS differentiation schemes in terms of Arbitrary Inter-Frame Space (AIFS), Contention Window (CW), and Transmission Opportunity (TXOP). This research starts with the development of new analytical models for the TXOP scheme specified in the EDCA protocol under Poisson traffic. A dynamic TXOP scheme is then proposed to adjust the TXOP limits according to the status of the transmission queue. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that the proposed dynamic scheme largely improves the performance of TXOP. To evaluate the TXOP scheme in the presence of ii heterogeneous traffic, a versatile analytical model is developed to capture the traffic heterogeneity and model the features of burst transmission. The performance results highlight the importance of taking into account the heterogeneous traffic for the accurate evaluation of the TXOP scheme in wireless multimedia networks. To obtain a thorough and deep understanding of the performance attributes of the EDCA protocol, a comprehensive analytical model is then proposed to accommodate the integration of the three QoS schemes of EDCA in terms of AIFS, CW, and TXOP under Poisson traffic. The performance results show that the TXOP scheme can not only support service differentiation but also improve the network performance, whereas the AIFS and CW schemes provide QoS differentiation only. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the MAC buffer size has considerable impact on the QoS performance of EDCA under Poisson traffic. To investigate the performance of EDCA in wireless multimedia networks, an analytical model is further developed for EDCA under heterogeneous traffic. The performance results demonstrate the significant effects of heterogeneous traffic on the total delay and frame losses of EDCA with different buffer sizes. Finally, an efficient admission control scheme is presented for the IEEE 802.11e WLANs based on analytical modelling and a game-theoretical approach. The admission control scheme can maintain the system operation at an optimal point where the utility of the Access Point (AP) is maximized with the QoS constraints of various users

A Cross-Layer Modification to the DSR Routing Protocol in Wireless Mesh Networks

A cross-layer modification to the DSR routing protocol that finds high throughput paths in WMNs has been introduced in this work. The Access Efficiency Factor (AEF) has been introduced in this modification as a local congestion avoidance metric for the DSR routing mechanism as an alternative to the hop count (Hc) metric. In this modification, the selected path is identified by finding a path with the highest minimum AEF (max_min_AEF) value. The basis of this study is to compare the performance of the Hc and max_min_AEF as routing metrics for the DSR protocol in WMNs using the OPNET modeler. Performance comparisons between max_min_AEF, Metric Path (MP), and the well known ETT metrics are also carried out in this work. The results of this modification suggest that employing the max_min_AEF as a routing metric outperforms the Hc, ETT, and MP within the DSR protocol in WMNs in terms of throughput. This is because the max_min_AEF is based upon avoiding directing traffic through congested nodes where significant packet loss is likely to occur. This throughput improvement is associated with an increment in the delay time due to the long paths taken to avoid congested regions. To overcome this drawback, a further modification to the routing discovery mechanism has been made by imposing a hop count limit (HCL) on the discovered paths. Tuning the HCL allows the network manager to tradeoff throughput against delay. The choice of congestion avoidance metric exhibits another shortcoming owing to its dependency on the packet size. It penalises the smaller packets over large ones in terms of path lengths. This has been corrected for by introducing a ModAEF metric that explicitly considers the size of the packet. The ModAEF metric includes a tuning factor that allows the operator determine the level of the weighting that should be applied to the packet size to correct for this dependence