Network architecture and medium access control for deploying third generation (3G) wireless systems over CATV networks

We propose a novel and cost‐effective approach for the deployment of third generation (3G) wireless systems over hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) CATV networks. The main goal is to facilitate 3G deployment over the existing CATV plant and reduce the large cost required for building a dedicated last mile infrastructure for 3G access networks. Our proposal reduces the last mile cost by sharing the existing CATV network and using the standard equipment and protocols of data‐over‐cable systems interface specifications (DOCSIS). This allows rapid deployment of 3G wireless systems, facilitates convergence of wireless and wireline networks and paves the way towards all IP wireless networks. Enhancements to the DOCSIS medium access control (MAC) protocol must be implemented in order to support Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for 3G data and signaling traffic. This paper presents the proposed 3G over CATV network architecture and DOCSIS medium access control (MAC) enhancements for enabling the support of QoS guarantees for 3G data and signaling traffic. The proposed MAC enhancements can reduce the access delay for delay‐sensitive traffic by 30 to 40% over existing DOCSIS MAC without compromising QoS guarantees for other traffic classes, or the DOCSIS channel utilization. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Providing statistical QoS guarantee for voice over IP in the IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

Recent years have seen greatly increasing interests in voice over IP in wireless LANs, in which the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function protocol or enhanced DCF protocol is used. However, since both DCF and EDCF are contention-based medium access control protocols, it is difficult for them to support the strict QoS requirement for VoIP. Therefore, in this article we propose a novel call admission control scheme that runs at the MAC layer to support VoIP services. The call admission control mechanism regulates voice traffic to efficiently coordinate medium contention among voice sources. The rate control mechanism regulates non-voice traffic to control its impact on the performance of voice traffic. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed schemes can well support statistical QoS guarantees for voice traffic and maintain stable high throughput for non-voice traffic at the same time.     

MLAP: a MAC level access protocol for the HFC 802.14 network

Interactive residential broadband/multimedia services are expected to be the next main event in the cyberspace experience. The large excess bandwidth (well over 300 MHz) available in today's cable TV (CATV) hybrid fiber/coaxial (HFC) plants is an ideal candidate to provide the underlying communications infrastructure for interactive digital services to the home; cable operators that have not yet upgraded their all-coaxial plants to HFC are quickly moving in this direction. MLAP is a flexible ATM-friendly MAC protocol that is capable of supporting various types of traffic with diverse quality-of-service requirements. We introduce a very versatile MAC protocol for the HFC 802.14 network. MLAP can provide integrated broadband services to the home, internetwork easily with ATM wide area networks, support QoS constraints for various types of traffic, and operate over a variety of physical layer protocols. Our presentation is only an extended summary of our medium-sharing protocol proposal to the IEEE 802.14 WG. We consider only error-free system operation. MLAP provides for the use of timers for the recovery of error situations in the network. MLAP is also supported by a management suite of protocols for management of the overall system     

A novel QoS‐aware MAC protocol for voice services over IEEE 802.11‐based WLANs

With the pervasive growth in the popularity of IEEE 802.11‐based wireless local area networks (WLANs) worldwide, the demand to support delay‐sensitive services such as voice has increased very rapidly. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the medium access control (MAC) architectures and quality of service (QoS) provisioning issues for WLANs. The major challenges in providing QoS to voice services through WLAN MAC protocols are outlined and the solution approaches proposed in the literature are reviewed. To this end, a novel QoS‐aware wireless MAC protocol, called hybrid contention‐free access (H‐CFA) protocol and a call admission control technique, called traffic stream admission control (TS‐AC) algorithm, are presented. The H‐CFA protocol is based on a novel idea that combines two contention‐free wireless medium access approaches, that is, round‐robin polling and time‐division multiple access (TDMA)‐like time slot assignment, and it increases the capacity of WLANs through efficient silence suppression. The TS‐AC algorithm ensures efficient admission control for consistent delay‐bound guarantees and further maximizes the capacity through exploiting the voice characteristic that it can tolerate some level of inconsecutive packet loss. The benefits of the proposed schemes are demonstrated in the simulations results. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A hierarchical HFC network with QoS guaranteed traffic policy

The rapid growing of the Internet makes multimedia and broadband services closer to the users. For people at home, two typical networks are available to access the Internet: telephone network and CATV network. This paper presents a hierarchical tree-based structure for the hybrid fiber-cable (HFC) network where the traditional HFC network is partitioned into segments. Each segment is coordinated by a central traffic controller (CTC). A reservation-based traffic policy is also proposed for the CTC to schedule the data transmissions within the segment to provide guaranteed QoS, such as constant bit rate (CBR) service and variable bit rate (VBR) service. The CTC also furnishes the bridging function so that local traffic within the controlled segment is filtered to save the network bandwidth. Based on the segmentation concept and filtering function, the bandwidth can be reused efficiently and the system performance is improved significantly. Simulation results indicate that the proposed hierarchical HFC network performs much better than the traditional HFC network in terms of delay, delay jitter and channel utilization. Through the proposed traffic policy, the hierarchical HFC network also offers guaranteed QoS for the users     

一种无线ATM网络的MAC协议

主要研究了无线ATM网络对MAC的需求，并介绍了适用于无线ATM的一种新的MAC方案。该协议支持不同类型信息传输，比如恒定比特率（CBR），可变比特率（VBR），可用比特率（ABR），未指定比特率（UBR）。另外此协议还提供了对宽带ATM主干网的无缝连接。同时也支持与ATM相关的QoS级别。对于该协议关注的各种情况的主要原理进行了讨论。     

Dynamic Code Assignment Medium Access (DCAMA) Protocol for Wireless Integrated Services Networks

A medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless mobile networks that supports integrated services and provides quality of service (QoS) support is presented and evaluated via simulation. A controlled random access protocol which allows all terminals to dynamically share a group of spread spectrum spreading codes is used. The protocol provides mobile terminals the access control required for efficient transfer of integrated traffic with QoS guarantees. Two service classes are provided; "best-effort" service, with priority queueing, and reserved bandwidth circuit service. The performance of the protocol is evaluated via simulation for traffic consisting of integrated voice, data and compressed video. The performance assessment measure is packet delay.     

Fair Delay Optimization-based Resource Allocation Algorithm for Video Traffic over Wireless Multimedia System

The major issue related to the realization of wireless multimedia system is the design of suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol. The design challenge is to maximize the utilization of the limited wireless resources while guaranteeing the various quality of service requirements for all traffic classes especially for the stringent real-time constraint of real time variable bit rate (rt-VBR) video service. In this paper a novel resource allocation algorithm for video traffic is proposed. The proposed allocation algorithm aims to provide fair delay for video packets by minimizing the delay difference among transmitted video packets. At the same time it adaptively controls the allocated resources (bandwidth) for video traffic around the corresponding average bit rate, and has the ability of controlling the quality of service (QoS) offered for video traffic in terms of packet loss probability and average delay. A minimized control overhead of only two bits is needed to increase the utilization efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves very high utilization and provides nearly fair delay among video packets. Its efficiency is also investigated under traffic integration condition with voice and data traffic to show that the QoS offered to video traffic does not change in the presence of the highest priority voice traffic while data traffic increases the channel utilization to 98% by using the remaining bandwidth after voice and video traffic while a good QoS is offered to voice and data traffic.

Terminal‐Assisted Hybrid MAC Protocol for Differentiated QoS Guarantee in TDMA‐Based Broadband Access Networks

This paper presents a terminal‐assisted frame‐based packet reservation multiple access (TAF‐PRMA) protocol, which optimizes random access control between heterogeneous traffic aiming at more efficient voice/data integrated services in dynamic reservation TDMA‐based broadband access networks. In order to achieve a differentiated quality‐of‐service (QoS) guarantee for individual service plus maximal system resource utilization, TAF‐PRMA independently controls the random access parameters such as the lengths of the access regions dedicated to respective service traffic and the corresponding permission probabilities, on a frame‐by‐frame basis. In addition, we have adopted a terminal‐assisted random access mechanism where the voice terminal readjusts a global permission probability from the central controller in order to handle the ‘fair access’ issue resulting from distributed queuing problems inherent in the access network. Our extensive simulation results indicate that TAF‐PRMA achieves significant improvements in terms of voice capacity, delay, and fairness over most of the existing medium access control (MAC) schemes for integrated services.     

Perceptive admission control for wireless network quality of service

As wireless networks become more widely used, there is a growing need to support advanced services, such as multimedia streaming and voice over IP. Traditional approaches to guarantee quality of service (QoS) work well only with predictable channel and network access. In wireless mobile networks, where conditions dynamically change as nodes move about the network, a stateless, high level approach is required. Since shared wireless resources are easily over-utilized, the load in the network must be controlled so that an acceptable QoS for real-time applications can be maintained. If minimum real-time requirements are not met, these unusable packets waste scarce bandwidth and hinder other traffic, compounding the problem. To enable high QoS for all admitted traffic, we propose the Perceptive Admission Control (PAC) protocol. PAC monitors the wireless channel and dynamically adapts admission control decisions to enable high network utilization while preventing congestion. Through discussion, simulations and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that PAC ensures low packet loss and delay for all admitted flows.     

A call admission control framework for voice over WLANs

In this article a call admission control framework is presented for voice over wireless local area networks (WLANs). The framework, called WLAN voice manager, manages admission control for voice over IP (VoIP) calls with WLANs as the access networks. WLAN voice manager interacts with WLAN medium access control (MAC) layer protocols, soft-switches (VoIP call agents), routers, and other network devices to perform end-to-end (ETE) quality of service (QoS) provisioning and control for VoIP calls originated from WLANs. By implementing the proposed WLAN voice manager in the WLAN access network, a two-level ETE VoIP QoS control mechanism can be achieved: level 1 QoS for voice traffic over WLAN medium access and level 2 QoS for ETE VoIP services in the networks with WLANs as the local access. The implementation challenges of this framework are discussed for both level 1 and level 2. Possible solutions to the implementation issues are proposed and other remaining open issues are also addressed.     

IP QoS delivery in a broadband wireless local loop: MAC protocoldefinition and performance evaluation

The wireless approach to the last mile access (wireless local loop, known as WLL) is becoming increasingly attractive to network operators and service providers since it offers a flexible and cost-effective solution to enable delivery of even broadband services to end customers. In this paper, a full-blown broadband WLL network is presented. The proposal is based on the OFDM-CDMA technique, to which an added dynamic reservation/request MAC protocol is proposed, fully exploiting the OFDM-CDMA platform. Central to our proposal is the support of different QoS profiles, in the context of QoS aware networks. As a case study, the explicit presentation of the IETF integrated services support over our WLL system is addressed. An extensive performance evaluation focused on the MAC layer is then reported. We prove that our scheme achieves high utilization efficiency, as well as a fair share of the available radio capacity, even in the presence of highly heterogeneous traffic mix. Delay performance is provided for both reference traffic models, as well as for measured IP and MPEG traffic traces offered to the system     

An Improved Pillar K-Means Based Protocol for Privacy-Preserving Location Monitoring in Wireless Sensor Network

A number of tiny sensor nodes are strategically placed in and around the human body to obtain physiological information. The sensor nodes are connected to a coordinator or a data collector to form a wireless body area network (WBAN). WBAN consists of variety of medical and non-medical applications with aggregate data rate requirement ranging from few bytes per second to 10 Mbps. These applications are having relatively different energy saving, reliability and quality of service (QoS) requirements. For example, emergency medical data are highly erratic but should be transferred with high reliability and minimum delay, whereas electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram applications are constant bit rate traffic which need to be transferred with moderate reliability. Additionally, non-medical applications include variable bit rate traffic and their jitter and delay requirements must also be met. On the above, a sensor node should spend minimum energy and conserve power to increase its life time in the network. The existing media access control (MAC) protocols present in various short and medium range wireless technologies such as 802.11 and 802.15.4 have been designed for specific purposes, and therefore, do not fulfill the diverse performance requirements across all WBAN applications. In this paper, we propose a poll-based MAC protocol, PMAC for WBAN, which can meet such diversified functional requirements of various WBAN applications. In particular, we introduce few concepts in polling based channel access mechanism to make an energy efficient and QoS aware MAC protocol. The design has been validated by obtaining the performance of proposed PMAC protocol through simulation.     

Energy Efficient QoS Aware Hierarchical KF-MAC Routing Protocol in Manet

The paper proposes an energy efficient quality of services (QoS) aware hierarchical KF-MAC routing protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks. The proposed KF-MAC (K-means cluster formation firefly cluster head selection based MAC routing) protocol reduces the concentration of QoS parameters when the node transmits data from source to destination. At first, K-means clustering technique is utilized for clustering the network into nodes. Then the clustered nodes are classified and optimized by the firefly optimization algorithm to find cluster heads for the clustered nodes. The transmission of data begins in the network nodes and TDMA based MAC routing does communication. The observation on KF-MAC protocol performs well for QoS parameters such as bandwidth, delay, bit error rate and jitter. The evaluation of proposed protocol based on a simulation study concludes that the proposed protocol provides a better result in contrast to the existing fuzzy based energy aware routing protocol and modified dynamic source routing protocol. With KF-MAC protocol, the collision free data transmission with low average energy consumption is achieved.     

A Cross-Layer Approach for WLAN Voice Capacity Planning

This paper presents an analytical approach to determining the maximum number of on/off voice flows that can be supported over a wireless local area network (WLAN), under a quality of service (QoS) constraint the authors consider multiclass distributed coordination function (DCF) based medium access control (MAC) that can provision service differentiation via contention window (CW) differentiation. Each on/off voice flow specifies a stochastic delay bound at the network layer as the QoS requirement. The downlink voice flows are multiplexed at the access point (AP) to alleviate the MAC congestion, where the AP is assigned a smaller CW compared to that of the mobile nodes to guarantee the aggregate downlink throughput. There are six-fold contributions in this paper: 1) a nonsaturated multiclass DCF model is developed; 2) a cross-layer framework is proposed, which integrates the network-layer queueing analysis with the multiclass DCF MAC modeling; 3) the channel busyness ratio control is included in the framework to guarantee the analysis accuracy; 4) the framework is exploited for statistical multiplexing gain analysis, network capacity planning, contention window optimization, and voice traffic rate design; 5) a head-of-line outage dropping (HOD) scheme is integrated with the AP traffic multiplexing to further improve the MAC channel utilization; 6) performance of the proposed cross-layer analysis and the associated applications are validated by extensive computer simulations.     

QoS-oriented packet scheduling for wireless multimedia CDMA communications

In the third-generation (and beyond) wireless communication systems, there will be a mixture of different traffic classes, each having its own transmission rate characteristics and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, a QoS-oriented medium access control (MAC) protocol with fair packet loss sharing (FPLS) scheduling is proposed for wireless code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications. The QoS parameters under consideration are the transmission bit error rate (BER), packet loss, and delay requirements. The MAC protocol exploits both time-division and code-division statistical multiplexing. The BER requirements are guaranteed by properly arranging simultaneous packet transmissions and controlling there transmit power levels, whereas the packet loss and delay requirements are guaranteed by proper packet scheduling. The basic idea of FPLS is to schedule the transmission of multimedia packets in such a way that all the users have a fair share of packet loss according to their QoS requirements, which maximizes the number of the served users under the QoS constraints. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of the FPLS scheduler, in comparison with other previously proposed scheduling algorithms.     

On Throughput Guarantee of Aloha-Like Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Providing Quality of Service (QoS) is one of significant issues for multimedia traffic. One approach to achieve the requested QoS is to characterize the traffic flows and guarantee their committed throughput. In a typical multi-hop wireless ad hoc network, determining the feasibility for a given set of flow characteristics is challenging due to the multi-user interference problem. To that end, this paper presents the following contributions. First, we describe a simple Aloha-like Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that enables each flow to maintain its requested bandwidth, and thus is suitable for multimedia traffic. Second, we propose a bandwidth feasibility algorithm based on the Variable Elimination (VE) technique. The bandwidth feasibility algorithm determines whether or not a given network can support a set of flows of certain bit rates. Simulations indicate that our solution can precisely control the bit rates over all hosts while providing the throughput guarantees.     

A packet reservation multiple access (PRMA)-based algorithm for multimedia wireless system

The major issue in the wireless multimedia system design is the selection of a suitable channel sharing media access control (MAC) protocol. The design challenge is to identify a wireless "multimedia capable" MAC protocol that provides a sufficient degree of transparency for many different kinds of services. This protocol should guarantee different quality of service (QoS) parameters for different types of traffic while in the same time achieving high throughput. In this paper a MAC protocol to serve different kinds of traffic, namely voice, data, and, real time variable bit rate (rt-VBR) video is proposed. The transmission time scale is divided into frames. Each frame is subdivided into N time slots. In this protocol, a fixed number of slots M out of 150 time slots are reserved at the beginning of every frame to transmit some of the video packets arriving during the frame interval. The rest of the video packets contend with the voice and data packets for the remaining time slots of this frame as in normal packet reservation multiple access (PRMA). One objective of this paper is to find the optimum value of M allowing the maximum number of voice and data users to share the RF channel with one video user. Another objective is to find the optimum permission probabilities of sending contending voice, data, and video packets allowing the maximum number of users sharing the RF channel. The dropping probability requirement for video is examined.     

Design and performance evaluation of a MAC protocol for wireless local area networks

We propose and analyze, from a performance viewpoint, a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The protocol, named Prioritized-Access with Centralized-Control (PACC), supports integrated traffics by guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network resources. The proposed protocol combines random access for signalling, with collision-free access to the transmission channel. The transmission channel is assumed to be slotted, with slots grouped into frames. Access to transmission slots is controlled by a centralized scheduler which manages a multiclass queue containing the users' requests to access the transmission channel. Three classes of users are assumed: voice traffic (voice), data traffic with real-time constraints (high-priority data), and classical data traffic (low-priority data). A priority mechanism ensures that speech users have the highest priority in accessing the idle slots, since speech packets have a more demanding delay constraint. The remaining channel bandwidth is shared fairly among the high-priority data terminals. The low-priority data terminals use the slots left empty by the other classes. Specifically, access to transmission slots is controlled by the centralized scheduler by managing a transmission cycle for each class of terminals. The voice-terminals cycle has a constant length equal to one frame, while the lengths of the data-terminals cycles are random variables which depend on the number of active voice and data terminals. In this paper we show that the proposed scheme can support the same maximum number of voice terminals as an ideal scheduler, while guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network capacity. In addition, via a performance analysis, we verify that by limiting the number of real-time data terminals in the network this class of traffic can be statistically guaranteed access delays in the order of 200–300 msec. Hence, the QoS the network gives to the real-time data terminals makes this service suitable for real-time applications such as alarms or low bit rate video. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Improved priority access, bandwidth allocation and traffic scheduling for DOCSIS cable networks

The Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS) is intended to support IP flows over HFC (hybrid fiber/coax) networks with significantly higher data rates than analog modems and Integrated Service Digital Network (ISDN) links for high quality audio, video and interactive services. To support quality-of-service (QoS) for such applications, it is important for HFC networks to provide effective media access and traffic scheduling mechanisms. In this paper, we first present a multilevel priority collision resolution scheme with adaptive contention window adjustment. The proposed collision resolution scheme separates and resolves collisions for different traffic priority classes (such as delay-sensitive and best effort streams), thus achieving the capability for preemptive priorities. Second, a novel MAC (media access control) scheduling mechanism and a new bandwidth allocation scheme are proposed to support multimedia traffic over DOCSIS-compliant cable networks. It is shown through simulation results that throughput and delay performance have been improved for the transmission of real-time VBR (variable bit rate) traffic as compared to current DOCSIS specifications.