Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2013.Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Bilkent University, 2013.Includes bibliographical references leaves 115-127.Variants of the carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol has been employed
in many communications protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 and Ethernet standards.
CSMA based medium access control (MAC) mechanisms have been recently
proposed for other communications scenarios such as sensor networks and
acoustical underwater networks. Despite its widespread use, the performance
of the CSMA protocol is not well-studied from the perspective of these newly
encountered networking scenarios. We here investigate the performance of the
CSMA protocol from the point of three different aspects: throughput in networks
with large propagation delay, short-term fairness for delay sensitive applications
in large networks and energy efficiency-throughput trade-off in networks with
battery operated devices.
Firstly, we investigate the performance of the CSMA protocol for channels
with large propagation delay. Such channels are recently encountered in underwater
acoustic networks and in terrestrial wireless networks covering larger areas.
However, a mathematical model of CSMA performance in such networks is not
known. We propose a semi-Markov model for a 2-node CSMA channel and then
extend this model for arbitrary number of users. Using this model, we obtain the
optimum symmetric probing rate that achieves the maximum network throughput
as a function of the average propagation delay, ¯d, and the number of nodes
sharing the channel, N. The proposed model predicts that the total capacity
decreases with ¯d
−1 as N goes to infinity when all nodes probe the channel at the
optimum rate. The optimum probing rate for each node decreases with 1/N and
the total optimum probing rate decreases faster than ¯d
−1 as N goes to infinity.
Secondly, we investigate whether the short-term fairness of a large CSMA network degrades with the network size and density. Our results suggest that (a)
the throughput region that can be achieved within the acceptable limits of shortterm
fairness reduces as the number of contending neighboring nodes increases for
random regular conflict graphs, (b) short-term fair capacity weakly depends on
the network size for a random regular conflict graph but a stronger dependence is
observed for a grid topology. We also present related results from the statistical
physics literature on long-range correlations in large systems and point out the
relation between these results and short-term fairness of CSMA systems.
Thirdly, we investigate the energy efficiency of a CSMA network proposing a
model for the energy consumption of a node as a function of its throughput. We
show that operating the CSMA network at a very high or at a very low throughput
is energy inefficient because of increasing carrier-sensing and sleeping costs, respectively.
Achieving a balance between these two opposite operating regimes, we
derive the energy-optimum carrier-sensing rate and the energy-optimum throughput
which maximize the number of transmitted bits for a given energy budget. For
the single-hop case, we show that the energy-optimum total throughput increases
as the number of nodes sharing the channel increases. For the multi-hop case, we
show that the energy-optimum throughput decreases as the degree of the conflict
graph of the network increases. For both cases, the energy-optimum throughput
reduces as the power required for carrier-sensing increases. The energy-optimum
throughput is also shown to be substantially lower than the maximum throughput
and the gap increases as the degree of the conflict graph increases for multi-hop
networks.Köseoğlu, MehmetPh.D
