OFDM over IEEE 802.11b hardware for telemedical applications

Using a wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) to transmit live high-quality video suitable for a telemedical application presents many challenges, including ensuring sufficient Quality of Service (QoS) for the end-user to be able to make an accurate diagnosis. One of the many problems that exist when developing such a system is the multipath effect caused by the reflections of the transmitted signals on various surfaces including walls, floors, furniture and people. This degrades the signal quality and reduces the amount of available bandwidth and, thus, the quality of the image. Presently, most of Europe is using the IEEE 802.11b hardware for such applications. As an alternative to the existing modulation of 802.11b, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is investigated, especially for use inside hospitals. The advantages of using this modulation over IEEE 802.11b hardware for a telemedicine application are examined by means of simulation using three different simulation packages

Spectrum Utilization and Congestion of IEEE 802.11 Networks in the 2.4 GHz ISM Band

Wi-Fi technology, plays a major role in society thanks to its widespread availability, ease of use and low cost. To assure its long term viability in terms of capacity and ability to share the spectrum efficiently, it is of paramount to study the spectrum utilization and congestion mechanisms in live environments. In this paper the service level in the 2.4 GHz ISM band is investigated with focus on todays IEEE 802.11 WLAN systems with support for the 802.11e extension. Here service level means the overall Quality of Service (QoS), i.e. can all devices fulfill their communication needs? A crosslayer approach is used, since the service level can be measured at several levels of the protocol stack. The focus is on monitoring at both the Physical (PHY) and the Medium Access Control (MAC) link layer simultaneously by performing respectively power measurements with a spectrum analyzer to assess spectrum utilization and packet sniffing to measure the congestion. Compared to traditional QoS analysis in 802.11 networks, packet sniffing allows to study the occurring congestion mechanisms more thoroughly. The monitoring is applied for the following two cases. First the influence of interference between WLAN networks sharing the same radio channel is investigated in a controlled environment. It turns out that retry rate, Clear-ToSend (CTS), Request-To-Send (RTS) and (Block) Acknowledgment (ACK) frames can be used to identify congestion, whereas the spectrum analyzer is employed to identify the source of interference. Secondly, live measurements are performed at three locations to identify this type of interference in real-live situations. Results show inefficient use of the wireless medium in certain scenarios, due to a large portion of management and control frames compared to data content frames (i.e. only 21% of the frames is identified as data frames)

Improving the Performance of Wireless LANs

This book quantifies the key factors of WLAN performance and describes methods for improvement. It provides theoretical background and empirical results for the optimum planning and deployment of indoor WLAN systems, explaining the fundamentals while supplying guidelines for design, modeling, and performance evaluation. It discusses environmental effects on WLAN systems, protocol redesign for routing and MAC, and traffic distribution; examines emerging and future network technologies; and includes radio propagation and site measurements, simulations for various network design scenarios, numerous illustrations, practical examples, and learning aids

Experimental assessment of the effects of cross-traffic on Wi-Fi video streaming

Wi-Fi networks are the first and sometimes only choice for the video streaming in homes, airports, malls, public areas and museums. However, Wi-Fi networks are vulnerable to interference, noise and have bandwidth limitations. Due to the intrinsic vulnerability of the communication channel, and the large number of variables involved, simulation alone is not enough in the evaluation of the performance of wireless networks. Actually, there is a tendency to give experimental tests a central role in the assessment of Wi-Fi networks performance. The paper presents an experimental analysis of the effects of cross traffic on the performance of video streaming over Wi-Fi, based on cross-layer measurements. Experiments are carried out in a semi-anechoic chamber, to prevent the results from being influenced by external factors. The experimental results permit to analyze the influence of cross traffic characteristics on cross layer measures and objective video quality metrics evaluated through a standardized approach

Cross-Layer measurement on an IEEE 802.11g wireless network supporting MPEG-2 video streaming applications in the presence of interference

The performance of wireless local area networks supporting video streaming applications, based on MPEG-2 video codec, in the presence of interference is here dealt with. IEEE 802.11g standard wireless networks, that do not support QoS in according with IEEE 802.11e standard, are, in particular, accounted for and Bluetooth signals, additive white Gaussian noise, and competitive data traffic are considered as sources of interference. The goal is twofold: from one side, experimentally assessing and correlating the values that some performance metrics assume at the same time at different layers of an IEEE 802.11g WLAN delivering video streaming in the presence of in-channel interference; from the other side, deducing helpful and practical hints for designers and technicians, in order to efficiently assess and enhance the performance of an IEEE 802.11g WLAN supporting video streaming in some suitable setup conditions and in the presence of interference. To this purpose, an experimental analysis is planned following a cross-layer measurement approach, and a proper testbed within a semianechoic chamber is used. Valuable results are obtained in terms of signal-to-interference ratio, packet loss ratio, jitter, video quality, and interference data rate; helpful hints for designers and technicians are finally gained

A cognitive QoS management framework for WLANs

Due to the precipitous growth of wireless networks and the paucity of spectrum, more interference is imposed to the wireless terminals which constraints their performance. In order to preserve such performance degradation, this paper proposes a framework which uses cognitive radio techniques for quality of service (QoS) management of wireless local area networks (LANs). The framework incorporates radio environment maps as input to a cognitive decision engine that steers the network to optimize its QoS parameters such as throughput. A novel experimentally verified heuristic physical model is developed to predict and optimize the throughput of wireless terminals. The framework was applied to realistic stationary and time-variant interference scenarios where an average throughput gain of 344% was achieved in the stationary interference scenario and 70% to 183% was gained in the time-variant interference scenario