IEEE 802.11ax: challenges and requirements for future high efficiency wifi

The popularity of IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLANs) has increased significantly in recent years because of their ability to provide increased mobility, flexibility, and ease of use, with reduced cost of installation and maintenance. This has resulted in massive WLAN deployment in geographically limited environments that encompass multiple overlapping basic service sets (OBSSs). In this article, we introduce IEEE 802.11ax, a new standard being developed by the IEEE 802.11 Working Group, which will enable efficient usage of spectrum along with an enhanced user experience. We expose advanced technological enhancements proposed to improve the efficiency within high density WLAN networks and explore the key challenges to the upcoming amendment.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design Implementation of Next Generation Wireless LAN for Mass Digital Cinema

We have been designing an over 1.2 Gbps throughput wireless for next generation WLAN system conform with IEEE802.11TGac’s requirements. It reaches 33 meter propagation distance by using 80MHz of bandiwdth on 5GHz band. 4x5 antennas configuration contribute 2nd-order diversity gain and maintain both the high throughput and performance. The Greenfield format preamble was proposed for its high efficiency. Novel phase rotation is employed to lower the PAPR signal. Run test for transmitting 90 frames of 40961714 pixels/frame under in-door channel model proves that the proposed system shall be considered for providing an excellent performance mass digital cinema. Index Terms—Gigabit wireless LAN, IEEE802.11 TGac, digital cinema transmissio

Wi-Fi의 신뢰성 및 에너지 효율성 향상을 위한 MAC/PHY 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2015. 8. 최성현.Over the last quarter century, wireless local area network (WLAN) technology has become an essential and indispensable part of our daily lives. Recently, a tremendously growing number of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops, are being equipped with Wi-Fi, the hallmark of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN, in order to meet ever-increasing traffic demands at extremely low cost. Encouraged by this remarkable success, Wi-Fi is facing two trends. First, the state-of-the-art IEEE 802.11 specifications, e.g., IEEE 802.11n and 802.11ac, have focused on improving physical layer (PHY) rate by enabling multiple antennas, called multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), and bandwidth widening, known as chan- nel bonding [1, 2]. Second, to achieve high throughput and transmission efficiency at medium access control (MAC) layer, IEEE 802.11n/ac standards have defined two types of frame aggregation techniques: MAC service data unit (MSDU) aggregation and MAC protocol data unit (MPDU) aggregation which amortize PHY/MAC proto- col overhead e.g., binary random backoff, physical layer convergence protocol (PLCP) preamble, and acknowledgement (ACK), over multiple frames by packing several MS- DUs and MPDUs into a single aggregate MSDU (A-MSDU) and aggregate MPDU (A-MPDU), respectively. Apparently, there is no doubt that these state-of-the-art features meet and fulfill i the requirements of Wi-Fi equipped device users by offering several hundred-fold in- creases in PHY rate and ubiquitous access. However, with respect to the demands of the battery-powered portable device users, the belief is easily broken from two per- spectives. First, since using higher PHY rate and longer A-MPDU are more vulnerable to channel errors especially for mobile users, the significant throughput performance degradation can be observed. Second, the emerging Wi-Fi chipsets, based on IEEE 802.11n/ac, consume much more energy than its legacy IEEE 802.11a/b/g counterparts due to the usage of MIMO and channel bonding. Nowadays, as the battery-powered portable device users place increasingly complex demands on the functionality of their devices which have strict power limitation, satisfaction with robust communication and battery life time is becoming increasingly important. In this dissertation, to address these challenges, we propose robust and energy efficient MAC/PHY layer strategies of Wi-Fi. First of all, to confirm those changes, we have conducted extensive experiments using state-of-the-art commercial IEEE 802.11n/ac-equipped devices and Microsofts Software Radio (Sora) platform. Our experiment results have revealed strong evidence that the use of long A-MPDU frames seriously deteriorates the Wi-Fi performance, i.e., throughput, especially for the pedestrian mobile users. Besides, we have found that the use of channel bonding remarkably consumes more energy, thus making Wi- Fi a primary energy consumer in the battery-powered portable devices. Especially, the energy cost is dominated by excessive and unnecessary listening and receiving operations. We begin an intra-frame rate control algorithm (Intra-RCA) design, called SNR- aware Intra-frame Rate Adaption (SIRA), which enhances the system performance of Wi-Fi in fast time-varying environments [3]. Widely used inter-frame rate control algorithms (Inter-RCAs), which select the PHY rate of each frame based on the time- ii averaged frame loss rate and the signal strength statistics, perform poorly for a long A-MPDU due to the channel variation in mobile environments. Unlike the previous ap- proaches, SIRA adapts the PHY rate on intra-frame basis, i.e., the PHY rate is updated in the middle of a frame according to user mobility. The performance of the proposed scheme is also evaluated by a trace-driven link level simulator employing the collected channel traces from real measurements. The simulation results show that SIRA outper- forms a standalone Inter-RCA in all tested traces. Despite its enhanced performance and considerable frame error reduction, the performance degradation caused by the impact of user mobility still remains due to the inherent limitation of IEEE 802.11 PHY design. Therefore, we conclude that this challenge should be solved with the assistance of PHY modification, and propose Channel-Aware Symbol Error Reduction (ChASER), a new practical channel estimation and tracking scheme for Wi-Fi receivers [4]. ChASER utilizes re-encoding and re-modulation of the received data symbol to keep up with the wireless channel dynamics at the granularity of orthogonal frequency division multi- plexing (OFDM) symbols. In addition, its low-complexity and feasibility of standard compliance is demonstrated by Microsofts Sora prototype implementation and experi- mentation. To our knowledge, ChASER is the first IEEE 802.11n-compatible channel tracking algorithm since other approaches addressing the time-varying channel con- ditions over a single (aggregated) frame duration require costly modifications of the IEEE 802.11 standard. Even though the above proposed approaches enhance the Wi- Fis throughput performance and robustness over conventional technique, the rest re- quirement of the portable device user, i.e., energy efficient Wi-Fi system design, should be addressed as ever. Accordingly, we propose a new power save operation as well as the corresponding protocol, called WiFi in Zizz (WiZizz), which judiciously exploits the characteristic iii of the channel bonding defined in IEEE 802.11ac and efficiently handles the channel bandwidth in an on-demand manner to minimize the traumatic energy spent by IEEE 802.11ac devices [5]. Our extensive measurement and simulation show significant per- formance improvement (as high as 73% energy saving) over a wide range of commu- nication scenarios. In addition, the feasibility of easy implementation is demonstrated by a prototype with a commercial 802.11ac device. To the best of our knowledge, WiZizz is the first IEEE 802.11ac-congenial energy efficient bandwidth management while other existing approaches require costly modifications of the IEEE 802.11ac specification. In summary, we propose a number of compelling algorithms and protocols to im- prove the robustness and energy efficiency in accordance with the paradigm shift of Wi-Fi. Moreover, our evaluation results show that the proposed schemes in this disser- tation are effective and yield considerable performance gain based on both the trace- driven link level simulation and the network level simulation which well reflects the wireless channel characteristics of the real world and the operation of IEEE 802.11 WLAN, respectively. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approaches by implement- ing prototypes in off-the-self IEEE 802.11n/ac devices and software-defined radio.Abstract Contents List of Tables List of Figures 1 Introduction 1.1 Paradigm Shift of Wi-Fi 1.2 DevelopmentTrend of IEEE802.11 1.2.1 MAC Features 1.2.2 PHY Features 1.3 Overview of Existing Approaches 1.3.1 Rate Adaptation 1.3.2 MPDU Length Optimization 1.3.3 Channel Estimation 1.3.4 Demystifying Wi-Fi Power Consumption 1.3.5 Minimizing Energy Consumption of Wi-Fi 1.4 Main Contributions 1.4.1 Impact of Mobility Analysis 1.4.2 Intra-frame Rate Adaptation 1.4.3 Enhanced Channel Estimation and Tracking 1.4.4 802.11ac Power Consumption Analysis 1.4.5 Energy Efficient Bandwidth Management 1.5 Organization of the Dissertation 2 Impact of Mobility 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Background 2.2.1 Channel Estimation and Compensation 2.2.2 Role of Pilot Subcarriers 2.2.3 Frame Aggregation 2.3 Measurement Study 2.3.1 Experimental Settings 2.3.2 Temporal Selectivity 2.3.3 Unreliability of A-MPDU in Mobile Environments 2.3.4 Relation between Symbol Dispersion and Mobility 2.4 Summary 3 SIRA: SNR-aware Intra-frame Rate Adaptation 3.1 Introduction 3.1.1 Revisit of Rate Adaptation Algorithms 3.1.2 Channel and Mobility Condition 3.2 ProposedAlgorithm 3.2.1 Pilot-based SNR Estimation 3.2.2 Mobility Detection 3.2.3 Unequal Modulation and Coding Scheme 3.2.4 Zero-overhead Feedback 3.2.5 SIRA Structure 3.3 Simulation 3.3.1 Trace-drivenLinkLevelSimulation 3.3.2 Mobility Detection Accuracy 3.3.3 Performance Comparison 3.4 Summary 4 ChASER: Channel-Aware Symbol Error Reduction 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Revisit of Channel Estimation Algorithms 4.3 ChASER Design 4.3.1 Channel Estimation using Unknown Data Symbols 4.3.2 Adaptive Filter 4.3.3 Adaptive Filter for MIMO 4.3.4 CRC-assisted Channel Correction 4.3.5 Summary of ChASER Operation 4.3.6 Impact of Step Size μ 4.4 Testbed Experiments 4.4.1 Prototype Implementation on SDR Platform 4.4.2 Testbed Settings 4.4.3 Performance Comparison 4.5 Simulation 4.5.1 Simulation Methodology 4.5.2 Estimation Accuracy 4.5.3 Impact of the A-MPDU Duration 4.5.4 Throughput Performance 4.6 Summary 5 Power Consumption of Wi-Fi: Modeling and Testbed Validation 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Revisit of IEEE 802.11ac Features 5.2.1 Wider Bandwidth Channel 5.2.2 MIMO and Higher Order Modulation 5.2.3 Relation between 802.11ac Features and Power 5.3 Modeling 802.11ac Power Consumption 5.3.1 Power Model of IEEE 802.11ac Receiver 5.3.2 Power Model of IEEE 802.11ac Transmitter 5.4 Power Consumption Measurement 5.4.1 Experimental Setting 5.4.2 Idle State Power Consumption 5.4.3 Receive State Power Consumption 5.4.4 Transmit State Power Consumption 5.4.5 PowerModelVerification 5.4.6 Summary 6 WiZizz: Energy Efficient Bandwidth Management 6.1 Introduction 6.2 WiFi Need to Zizz 6.3 WiZizz Design 6.3.1 Dynamic Mode 6.3.2 Pseudo-dynamic Mode 6.3.3 PHY-level Filtering 6.4 Testbed Experiments 6.4.1 Prototype Implementation and Testbed Setting 6.4.2 Bandwidth Switching Delay 6.4.3 Performance Evaluation 6.5 SimulationResults 6.5.1 Simulation Methodology 6.5.2 Constant Traffic Source with FixedMCS 6.5.3 Comprehensive Traffic Patterns 6.5.4 Collaboration with SMPS 6.6 Summary 7 Conclusion and Future Work 7.1 Research Contributions 7.2 Further Research Plans Abstract (In Korean) 감사의 글Docto

Design and optimization of QoS-based medium access control protocols for next-generation wireless LANs

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In recent years, there have been tremendous advances in wireless & mobile communications, including wireless radio techniques, networking protocols, and mobile devices. It is expected that different broadband wireless access technologies, e.g., WiFi (IEEE 802.11) and WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) will coexist in the future. In the meantime, multimedia applications have experienced an explosive growth with increasing user demands. Nowadays, people expect to receive high-speed video, audio, voice and web services even when being mobile. The key question that needs to be answered, then, is how do we ensure that users always have the "best" network performance with the "lowest" costs in such complicated situations? The latest IEEE 802.11n standards attains rates of more than 100 Mbps by introducing innovative enhancements at the PHY and MAC layer, e.g. MIMO and Frame Aggregation, respectively. However, in this thesis we demonstrate that frame aggregation's performance adheres due to the EDCA scheduler's priority mechanism and consequently resulting in the network's poor overall performance. Short waiting times for high priority flows into the aggregation queue resolves to poor channel utilization. A Delayed Channel Access algorithm was designed to intentionally postpone the channel access procedure so that the number of packets in a formed frame can be increased and so will the network's overall performance. However, in some cases, the DCA algorithm has a negative impact on the applications that utilize the TCP protocol, especially the when small TCP window sizes are engaged. So, the TCP process starts to refrain from sending data due to delayed acknowledgements and the overall throughput drops. In this thesis, we address the above issues by firstly demonstrating the potential performance benefits of frame aggregation over the next generation wireless networks. The efficiency and behaviour of frame aggregation within a single queue, are mathematically analysed with the aid of a M=G[a;b]=1=K model. Results show that a trade-off choice has to be taken into account over minimizing the waiting time or maximizing utilization. We also point out that there isn't an optimum batch collection rule which can be assumed as generally valid but individual cases have to be considered separately. Secondly, we demonstrate through extensive simulations that by introducing a method, the DCA algorithm, which dynamically determines and adapts batch collections based upon the traffic's characteristics, QoS requirements and server's maximum capacity, also improves e ciency. Thirdly, it is important to understand the behaviour of the TCP ows over the WLAN and the influence that DCA has over the degrading performance of the TCP protocol. We investigate the cause of the problem and provide the foundations of designing and implementing possible solutions. Fourthly, we introduce two innovative proposals, one amendment and one extension to the original DCA algorithm, called Adaptive DCA and Selective DCA, respectively. Both solutions have been implemented in OPNET and extensive simulation runs over a wide set of scenarios show their effectiveness over the network's overall performance, each in its own way.This study was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Robust and Interference-Resilient MAC/PHY Layer Strategies for WLANs

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2018. 2. 최성현.Thanks to the explosive growth of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs, IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN), often referred to as WiFi, has become one of the most successful wireless access technologies, supporting ever increasing demand for high data rates at relatively low cost. Encouraged by this remarkable success, the state-of-the-art IEEE 802.11 WLAN provides a physical layer (PHY) data rate of Gb/s to a single user in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, by enabling multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) technology, which utilizes multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver, and channel bonding which aggregates multiple 20 MHz channels up to 160 MHz bandwidth. Furthermore, as a key feature to enhance medium access control (MAC) efficiency, IEEE 802.11 standard defines frame aggregation called aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU), which amortizes PHY protocol overhead over multiple frames by packing several MPDUs into a single frame. In this dissertation, we propose the following three strategies to enhance throughput performance in practice: (1) Mobility-aware PHY rate and A-MPDU length control, (2) Receiver-driven operating channel width adaptation, and (3) Receive architecture for eliminating time-domain interference not overlapping with the desired signal in frequency-domain. Firstly, a significant growth of mobile data traffic volume, primarily generated by portable devices, has led to a change of WLAN communication environmentsthe wireless channel condition in WLAN system is no longer quasi-stationary over the duration of a single frame reception. Especially, frame aggregation, i.e., A-MPDU, which lengthens frame duration significantly, causes the channel state information (CSI) obtained at the preamble can be no longer valid for successfully decoding the latter part of A-MPDUs, when the channel condition substantially changes during the A-MPDU reception. To cope with this problem, we analyze the wireless channel dynamics considering mobility through extensive measurements, and we then build a model which represents the impact of mobility with a noise vector in the I-Q plane, to investigate how the mobility affects the A-MPDU reception performance. Based on our analysis, we develop STRALE, a standard-compliant and mobility-aware PHY rate and A-MPDU length adaptation scheme with ease of implementation. Through extensive simulations with 802.11ac using ns-3 and prototype implementation with commercial 802.11n devices, we demonstrate that STRALE achieves up to 2.9 higher throughput, compared to a fixed duration setting according to IEEE 802.11 standard. STRALE simply requires to update device driver only at one end of the wireless link (i.e., transmitter), thus allowing it to be applicable to any kind of platforms. Second, IEEE 802.11ac supports bandwidth of 20, 40, and 80 MHz as a mandatory feature, and optionally supports 160 MHz bandwidth. To transmit and receive packets using such wide bandwidth, the 802.11ac devices need to increase the size of fast Fourier transform (FFT), equivalently, the baseband bandwidth, referred to as operating channel width (OCW). However, our experiment results reveal various situations where bandwidth adaptation without changing the receivers OCW, leads to poor reception performance due surprisingly to time-domain interference not overlapping with the incoming desired signal in frequency domain. To cope with this problem, we develop RECONN, a standard-compliant and receiver-driven OCW adaptation scheme with ease of implementation. Our prototype implementation in commercial 802.11ac devices shows that RECONN achieves up to 1.85x higher throughput by completely eliminating time-domain interference. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to discover the time-domain interference problem, and to develop OCW adaptation scheme in 802.11ac system. Finally, based on the observation that time-domain interference causes 1) packet detection and synchronization failure, 2) undesirable receive locking problem, and 3) automatic gain control (AGC) failure, we propose a receive architecture called REACTER to eliminate the impact of time-domain interference: REACTER digitally extracts the desired preamble signal not affected by time-domain interference, and provides interference-resilient A-MPDU reception performance by real-time AGC level adaptation during A-MPDU reception. The proposed receive architecture extensively evaluated via IT++ based link-level simulator, and the simulation results show that REACTER significantly improves the frame reception performance by completely eliminates the impact of time-domain interference. In summary, we identify the two existing problems through the extensive measurement and simulations, and we then propose compelling algorithms to improve the throughput performance. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approaches by implementing prototypes in off-the-shelf commercial 802.11n/ac devices, showing that our proposed algorithms fully comply with the 802.11 MAC and requires no PHY modification such that it can be applicable to the existing hardware platform by simply updating the device driver only at one end of the wireless link. Furthermore, we present a novel receive architecture which shows the ability to fundamentally enhance the performance of wide bandwidth operation with very low cost and complexity.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Overview of Existing Approach 3 1.2.1 A-MPDU Length Adaptation 3 1.2.2 Wide Bandwidth Operation in IEEE 802.11ac WLANs 4 1.2.3 Receive Architecture for WLAN Devices 5 1.3 Main Contributions 6 1.3.1 Mobility-Aware PHY Rate and A-MPDU Length Adaptation 6 1.3.2 Receiver-Driven Operating Channel Width Adaptation 7 1.3.3 Rx Architecture for Eliminating Time-Domain Interference 7 1.4 Organization of the Dissertation 8 2 STRALE: Mobility-Aware PHY Rate and A-MPDU Length Adaptation in IEEE 802.11 WLANs 10 2.1 Introduction 10 2.2 Preliminaries . 12 2.2.1 Channel Estimation and Compensation 12 2.2.2 Frame Aggregation 14 2.2.3 Modulation and Coding Schemes 15 2.2.4 MIMO, SM, STBC and channel bonding 15 2.3 Case Study 16 2.3.1 Experimental Setting 16 2.3.2 Temporal Selectivity 17 2.3.3 Impact of Mobility 18 2.3.4 Impact of MCSs 21 2.3.5 IEEE 802.11n/ac Features 22 2.3.6 Rate Adaptation: Minstrel 23 2.4 Caudal Noise Model 25 2.4.1 Caudal Noise Modeling for n x n MIMO Channel 26 2.4.2 Impact of Caudal Noise 28 2.5 STRALE: Proposed Algorithm 30 2.5.1 Possible Solutions for Caudal Loss Problem 31 2.5.2 Operation of STRALE 32 2.6 Performance Evaluation 37 2.6.1 Methodology 37 2.6.2 Simulation Results 39 2.6.3 Prototype Implementation 44 2.7 Summary 46 3 RECONN: Receiver-Driven Operating Channel Width Adaptation in IEEE 802.11ac WLANs 48 3.1 Introduction 48 3.2 Preliminaries 51 3.2.1 Packet Detection and Initial Synchronization 51 3.2.2 Wide Bandwidth Operation 52 3.3 Cast Study 53 3.3.1 Motivation 55 3.3.2 Packet Detection and Synchronization Failure 57 3.3.3 Receive Locking to Interference Signal 59 3.3.4 AGC Failure 61 3.4 RECONN: Proposed Algorithm 64 3.4.1 Possible Solutions 64 3.4.2 RECONN 67 3.5 Performance Evaluation 70 3.5.1 One-to-One Scenario 72 3.5.2 Multi-station Scenario 74 3.6 Summary 75 4 REACTER: Receive Architecture for Eliminating Time-Domain Interference 76 4.1 Introduction 76 4.2 Preliminaries 78 4.2.1 Packet Detection and Synchronization 78 4.2.2 Automatic Gain Control in IEEE 802.11 WLAN 80 4.3 REACTER: Proposed Architecture 80 4.3.1 Simulation Methodology 80 4.3.2 Digital Low Pass Filter (DLPF) 82 4.3.3 Real-Time AGC 89 4.3.4 Structure of REACTER 96 4.4 Performance Evaluation 100 4.5 Summary 101Docto

Feasibility study of multiantenna transmitter baseband processing on customized processor core in wireless local area devices

The world of wireless communications is governed by a wide variety of the standards, each tailored to its specific applications and targets. The IEEE802.11 family is one of those standards which is specifically created and maintained by IEEE committee to im-plement the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) communication. By notably rapid growth of devices which exploit the WLAN technology and increasing demand for rich multimedia functionalities and broad Internet access, the WLAN technology should be necessarily enhanced to support the required specifications. In this regard, IEEE802.11ac, the latest amendment of the WLAN technology, was released which is taking advantage of the previous draft versions while benefiting from certain changes especially to the PHY layer to satisfy the promised requirements. This thesis evaluates the feasibility of software-based implementation for the MIMO transmitter baseband processing conforming to the IEEE802.11ac standard on a DSP core with vector extensions. The transmitter is implemented in four different transmis-sion scenarios which include 2x2 and 4x4 MIMO configurations, yielding beyond 1Gbps transmit bit rate. The implementation is done for the frequency-domain pro-cessing and real-time operation has been achieved when running at a clock fre-quency of 500MHz. The developed software solution is evaluated by profiling and analysing the imple-mentation using the tools provided by the vendor. We have presented the results with regards to number of clock cycles, power and energy consumption, and memory usage. The performance analysis shows that the SDR based implementation provides improved flexibility and reduced design effort compared to conventional approaches while main-taining power consumption close to fixed-function hardware solutions

ERROR CORRECTION CODE-BASED EMBEDDING IN ADAPTIVE RATE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

In this dissertation, we investigated the methods for development of embedded channels within error correction mechanisms utilized to support adaptive rate communication systems. We developed an error correction code-based embedding scheme suitable for application in modern wireless data communication standards. We specifically implemented the scheme for both low-density parity check block codes and binary convolutional codes. While error correction code-based information hiding has been previously presented in literature, we sought to take advantage of the fact that these wireless systems have the ability to change their modulation and coding rates in response to changing channel conditions. We utilized this functionality to incorporate knowledge of the channel state into the scheme, which led to an increase in embedding capacity. We conducted extensive simulations to establish the performance of our embedding methodologies. Results from these simulations enabled the development of models to characterize the behavior of the embedded channels and identify sources of distortion in the underlying communication system. Finally, we developed expressions to define limitations on the capacity of these channels subject to a variety of constraints, including the selected modulation type and coding rate of the communication system, the current channel state, and the specific embedding implementation.Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Advanced Protocols for Peer-to-Peer Data Transmission in Wireless Gigabit Networks

This thesis tackles problems on IEEE 802.11 MAC layer, network layer and application layer, to further push the performance of wireless P2P applications in a holistic way. It contributes to the better understanding and utilization of two major IEEE 802.11 MAC features, frame aggregation and block acknowledgement, to the design and implementation of opportunistic networks on off-the-shelf hardware and proposes a document exchange protocol, including document recommendation. First, this thesis contributes a measurement study of the A-MPDU frame aggregation behavior of IEEE 802.11n in a real-world, multi-hop, indoor mesh testbed. Furthermore, this thesis presents MPDU payload adaptation (MPA) to utilize A-MPDU subframes to increase the overall throughput under bad channel conditions. MPA adapts the size of MAC protocol data units to channel conditions, to increase the throughput and lower the delay in error-prone channels. The results suggest that under erroneous conditions throughput can be maximized by limiting the MPDU size. As second major contribution, this thesis introduces Neighborhood-aware OPPortunistic networking on Smartphones (NOPPoS). NOPPoS creates an opportunistic, pocket-switched network using current generation, off-the-shelf mobile devices. As main novel feature, NOPPoS is highly responsive to node mobility due to periodic, low-energy scans of its environment, using Bluetooth Low Energy advertisements. The last major contribution is the Neighborhood Document Sharing (NDS) protocol. NDS enables users to discover and retrieve arbitrary documents shared by other users in their proximity, i.e. in the communication range of their IEEE 802.11 interface. However, IEEE 802.11 connections are only used on-demand during file transfers and indexing of files in the proximity of the user. Simulations show that NDS interconnects over 90 \% of all devices in communication range. Finally, NDS is extended by the content recommendation system User Preference-based Probability Spreading (UPPS), a graph-based approach. It integrates user-item scoring into a graph-based tag-aware item recommender system. UPPS utilizes novel formulas for affinity and similarity scoring, taking into account user-item preference in the mass diffusion of the recommender system. The presented results show that UPPS is a significant improvement to previous approaches

Optimization of the interoperability and dynamic spectrum management in mobile communications systems beyond 3G

The future wireless ecosystem will heterogeneously integrate a number of overlapped Radio Access Technologies (RATs) through a common platform. A major challenge arising from the heterogeneous network is the Radio Resource Management (RRM) strategy. A Common RRM (CRRM) module is needed in order to provide a step toward network convergence. This work aims at implementing HSDPA and IEEE 802.11e CRRM evaluation tools. Innovative enhancements to IEEE 802.11e have been pursued on the application of cross-layer signaling to improve Quality of Service (QoS) delivery, and provide more efficient usage of radio resources by adapting such parameters as arbitrary interframe spacing, a differentiated backoff procedure and transmission opportunities, as well as acknowledgment policies (where the most advised block size was found to be 12). Besides, the proposed cross-layer algorithm dynamically changes the size of the Arbitration Interframe Space (AIFS) and the Contention Window (CW) duration according to a periodically obtained fairness measure based on the Signal to Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) and transmission time, a delay constraint and the collision rate of a given machine. The throughput was increased in 2 Mb/s for all the values of the load that have been tested whilst satisfying more users than with the original standard. For the ad hoc mode an analytical model was proposed that allows for investigating collision free communications in a distributed environment. The addition of extra frequency spectrum bands and an integrated CRRM that enables spectrum aggregation was also addressed. RAT selection algorithms allow for determining the gains obtained by using WiFi as a backup network for HSDPA. The proposed RAT selection algorithm is based on the load of each system, without the need for a complex management system. Simulation results show that, in such scenario, for high system loads, exploiting localization while applying load suitability optimization based algorithm, can provide a marginal gain of up to 450 kb/s in the goodput. HSDPA was also studied in the context of cognitive radio, by considering two co-located BSs operating at different frequencies (in the 2 and 5 GHz bands) in the same cell. The system automatically chooses the frequency to serve each user with an optimal General Multi-Band Scheduling (GMBS) algorithm. It was shown that enabling the access to a secondary band, by using the proposed Integrated CRRM (iCRRM), an almost constant gain near 30 % was obtained in the throughput with the proposed optimal solution, compared to a system where users are first allocated in one of the two bands and later not able to handover between the bands. In this context, future cognitive radio scenarios where IEEE 802.11e ad hoc modes will be essential for giving access to the mobile users have been proposed

Decentralized Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications through Concurrent Cooperative Transmission

Emerging cyber-physical systems demand for communication technologies that enable seamless interactions between humans and physical objects in a shared environment. This thesis proposes decentralized URLLC (dURLLC) as a new communication paradigm that allows the nodes in a wireless multi-hop network (WMN) to disseminate data quickly, reliably and without using a centralized infrastructure. To enable the dURLLC paradigm, this thesis explores the practical feasibility of concurrent cooperative transmission (CCT) with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). CCT allows for an efficient utilization of the medium by leveraging interference instead of trying to avoid collisions. CCT-based network flooding disseminates data in a WMN through a reception-triggered low-level medium access control (MAC). OFDM provides high data rates by using a large bandwidth, resulting in a short transmission duration for a given amount of data. This thesis explores CCT-based network flooding with the OFDM-based IEEE 802.11 Non-HT and HT physical layers (PHYs) to enable interactions with commercial devices. An analysis of CCT with the IEEE 802.11 Non-HT PHY investigates the combined effects of the phase offset (PO), the carrier frequency offset (CFO) and the time offset (TO) between concurrent transmitters, as well as the elapsed time. The analytical results of the decodability of a CCT are validated in simulations and in testbed experiments with Wireless Open Access Research Platform (WARP) v3 software-defined radios (SDRs). CCT with coherent interference (CI) is the primary approach of this thesis. Two prototypes for CCT with CI are presented that feature mechanisms for precise synchronization in time and frequency. One prototype is based on the WARP v3 and its IEEE 802.11 reference design, whereas the other prototype is created through firmware modifications of the Asus RT-AC86U wireless router. Both prototypes are employed in testbed experiments in which two groups of nodes generate successive CCTs in a ping-pong fashion to emulate flooding processes with a very large number of hops. The nodes stay synchronized in experiments with 10 000 successive CCTs for various modulation and coding scheme (MCS) indices and MAC service data unit (MSDU) sizes. The URLLC requirement of delivering a 32-byte MSDU with a reliability of 99.999 % and with a latency of 1 ms is assessed in experiments with 1 000 000 CCTs, while the reliability is approximated by means of the frame reception rate (FRR). An FRR of at least 99.999 % is achieved at PHY data rates of up to 48 Mbit/s under line-of-sight (LOS) conditions and at PHY data rates of up to 12 Mbit/s under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions on a 20 MHz wide channel, while the latency per hop is 48.2 µs and 80.2 µs, respectively. With four multiple input multiple output (MIMO) spatial streams on a 40 MHz wide channel, a LOS receiver achieves an FRR of 99.5 % at a PHY data rate of 324 Mbit/s. For CCT with incoherent interference, this thesis proposes equalization with time-variant zero-forcing (TVZF) and presents a TVZF receiver for the IEEE 802.11 Non-HT PHY, achieving an FRR of up to 92 % for CCTs from three unsyntonized commercial devices. As CCT-based network flooding allows for an implicit time synchronization of all nodes, a reception-triggered low-level MAC and a reservation-based high-level MAC may in combination support various applications and scenarios under the dURLLC paradigm