Adaptive delayed channel access for IEEE 802.11n WLANs

Abstract— In this paper we investigate potential benefits that an adaptive delayed channel access algorithm can attain for the next-generation wireless LANs, the IEEE 802.11n. We show that the performance of frame aggregation introduced by the 802.11n adheres due to the priority mechanism of the legacy 802.11e EDCA scheduler, resulting in a poor overall performance. Because high priority flows have low channel utilization, the low priority flows throughputs can be amerced further. By introducing an additional delay at the MAC layer, before the channel access scheduling, it will retain aggregate sizes at higher numbers and consequently a better channel utilization. Also, in order to support both UDP and TCP transport layer protocols, the algorithm’s operational conditions are kept adaptive. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed adaptive delayed channel access outperforms significantly the current 802.11n specification and non-adaptive delayed channel access

Video QoS/QoE over IEEE802.11n/ac: A Contemporary Survey

The demand for video applications over wireless networks has tremendously increased, and IEEE 802.11 standards have provided higher support for video transmission. However, providing Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for video over WLAN is still a challenge due to the error sensitivity of compressed video and dynamic channels. This thesis presents a contemporary survey study on video QoS/QoE over WLAN issues and solutions. The objective of the study is to provide an overview of the issues by conducting a background study on the video codecs and their features and characteristics, followed by studying QoS and QoE support in IEEE 802.11 standards. Since IEEE 802.11n is the current standard that is mostly deployed worldwide and IEEE 802.11ac is the upcoming standard, this survey study aims to investigate the most recent video QoS/QoE solutions based on these two standards. The solutions are divided into two broad categories, academic solutions, and vendor solutions. Academic solutions are mostly based on three main layers, namely Application, Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) which are further divided into two major categories, single-layer solutions, and cross-layer solutions. Single-layer solutions are those which focus on a single layer to enhance the video transmission performance over WLAN. Cross-layer solutions involve two or more layers to provide a single QoS solution for video over WLAN. This thesis has also presented and technically analyzed QoS solutions by three popular vendors. This thesis concludes that single-layer solutions are not directly related to video QoS/QoE, and cross-layer solutions are performing better than single-layer solutions, but they are much more complicated and not easy to be implemented. Most vendors rely on their network infrastructure to provide QoS for multimedia applications. They have their techniques and mechanisms, but the concept of providing QoS/QoE for video is almost the same because they are using the same standards and rely on Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) to provide QoS

A Novel Packet Aggregation Mechanism for Enhancing VoIP Performance on IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks

In 802.11 Wireless Mesh Network (WMN), bandwidth will be wasted much for transferring VoIP flows since each voice frame must contain relatively large amount of protocol data. “Packet Aggregation” mechanism can be applied to merge the voice data of multiple VoIP flows into one frame for transmission. It reduces the waste on bandwidth and increases the maximum number of successful VoIP calls. In addition, the mechanism “MCF controlled channel access” (MCCA) defined in 802.11 standard can be used to obtain better QoS than adopting default EDCA mechanism. In MCCA, mesh stations which wants to transfer VoIP flows can reserve time intervals of the medium for transmission and this reservation will be advertised to their neighbors. It is why MCCA causes less medium contentions than EDCA. In this paper, a mechanism to transfer VoIP flows in IEEE 802.11 WMN by MCCA with packet aggregation scheme is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is shown by simulation results. In addition, the problem named as Routing-Packet Aggregation / De-aggregation-Scheduling optimization problem (abbr. RPADS problem) derived from the proposed mechanism is also studied. A heuristic algorithm for RPADS problem to maximize the total number of supported calls is also proposed

Wireless broadband access: WiMAX and beyond - Investigation of bandwidth request mechanisms under point-to-multipoint mode of WiMAX networks

The WiMAX standard specifies a metropolitan area broadband wireless access air interface. In order to support QoS for multimedia applications, various bandwidth request and scheduling mechanisms are suggested in WiMAX, in which a subscriber station can send request messages to a base station, and the base station can grant or reject the request according to the available radio resources. This article first compares two fundamental bandwidth request mechanisms specified in the standard, random access vs. polling under the point-to-multipoint mode, a mandatory transmission mode. Our results demonstrate that random access outperforms polling when the request rate is low. However, its performance degrades significantly when the channel is congested. Adaptive switching between random access and polling according to load can improve system performance. We also investigate the impact of channel noise on the random access request mechanism