Cross-layer design for the transmission of multimedia traffic over fading channels.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.Providing guarantees in the Quality of Service (QoS) has become essential to the transmission of multimedia traffic over wireless links with fading channels. However this poses significant challenges due to the variable nature of such channels and the diverse QoS requirements of different applications including voice, video and data. The benefits of dynamic adaptation to system and channel conditions have been accepted, but the true potential of optimized adaptation is lost if the layers operate independently, ignoring possible interdependencies between them. Cross-layer design mechanisms exploit such interdependencies to provide QoS guarantees for the transmission of multimedia traffic over fading channels. Channel adaptive M-QAM schemes are examples of some of the earliest works in the area of cross-layer design. However, many of the original schemes use the assumption that thresholds designed for AWGN channels can be directly applied to slow-fading channels. The thresholds are calculated with a commonly used approximation bit error rate (BER) expression and the first objective of the thesis was to study the accuracy of this commonly used expression in fading channels. It is shown that that the inaccuracy of the expression makes it unsuitable for use in the calculation of the threshold points for an adaptive M-QAM system over fading channels. An alternative BER expression is then derived which is shown to be far more accurate than the previous one. The improved accuracy is verified through simulations of the system over Nakagami-m fading channels. Many of the cross-layer adaptation mechanisms that address the QoS provisioning problem only use the lower layers (physical and data link) and few explore the possibility of using higher layers. As a result, restrictions are placed on the system which introduces functional limitations such as the inability to insert more than one class of traffic in a physical layer frame. The second objective in this thesis was to design a physical and application layer cross-layer adaptation mechanism which overcomes this limitation. The performance results of the scheme in both AWGN and fading channels show that the cross-layer mechanism can be efficiently utilized for the purposes of providing error rate QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic transmissions over wireless links

Design and implementation of an on-demand ad-hoc routing algorithm for a positional communication system.

Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.A mobile ad-hoc network is an autonomous network of mobile devices that are connected via wireless links. In such networks there is no pre-existing infrastructure and nodes are free to move in a random fashion. Due to this mobility mobile ad-hoc networks have dynamic topologies. A host in the network typically has limited bandwidth and energy resources. Routing is a major challenge in the development of such systems and there have been many solutions proposed in the recent past. The aim of this work is to design and implement a routing scheme for a Positional Communication System (PCS). The PCS is a network of mobile handheld pocket PCs connected via wireless interfaces. The system allows voice and data communication between nodes in the network. This dissertation addresses the process of designing a routing protocol for an ad-hoc network. There have been many proposed algorithms that solve the routing problem in a mobile ad-hoc network. It is a difficult task to compare the performance of'these protocols qualitatively as there are many parameters that affect network performance. Various simulation packages for networks of this type exist. One such package is the Network Simulator (NS-2). It is a discrete time event simulator that can be used to model wired and wireless networks. This dissertation presents NS-2 simulations that compare four recently proposed routing algorithms. From this comparison study it is shown that on-demand algorithms perform best in a mobile ad-hoc environment. The dissertation then describes the design of a novel on-demand routing algorithm. The ondemand algorithms proposed thus far use a blind flooding technique during the route discovery process. This method is inefficient and creates excessive routing overhead. The routing protocol proposed in the dissertation implements a query localization technique that significantly reduces the network traffic. The protocol also introduces a load checking metric in addition to the metric used by most on-demand schemes, namely hop count. Simulation results show that such a scheme makes the on-demand routing algorithm more efficient and scalable than existing ones. It is widely believed that prior to implementing a routing protocol in real world systems it is essential that it is tested and validated on a test-bed. The dissertation presents the implementation of an on-demand routing algorithm in a Positional Communication System test-bed, where each handheld PC in the network runs an embedded Linux operating system