MAC protocols using directional antennas in IEEE 802.11 based ad hoc networks

Using directional antennas can be beneficial for wireless ad hoc networks consisting of a collection of wireless hosts. The most important benefit includes a reduction of the radio interference. Thus, it can significantly increase the spatial reuse, thereby improving the network throughput. To best utilize directional antennas, a suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol must be designed. Current MAC protocols, such as the IEEE 802.11 standard, do not benefit when using directional antennas, because these protocols have been designed for omnidirectional antennas. In this paper, we present modified MAC protocols suitable for 802.11 based ad hoc networks using directional antennas. Our comprehensive simulation results demonstrate the performance improvement obtained with the proposed protocols. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measurement‐based link scheduling for maritime mesh networks with directional antennas

The proliferation of wireless transceivers and the availability of the unlicensed band has given a boost to the deployment of wireless networks, with IEEE802.11/WiFi being the major driver in this arena. In this research, we consider a wireless mesh network designed for long‐distance communication with a typical deployment scenario of a maritime mesh network. This network uses an antenna system made up of multiple fixed‐beamwidth antennas. Compared to most other directional antenna schemes which use directional antenna for transmission and omni‐directional antenna for reception, our system uses directional antennas for both transmission and reception where a pair of transmitter–receiver antennas needs to be aligned and have an acceptable channel quality before transmission can take place. Through efficient use of directional antennas for both transmission and reception, and spatial reuse in transmission, we are able to realize a high‐capacity mesh network. In this paper, we present a practical approach to achieve contention‐free medium access, namely, a measurement‐based link‐scheduling algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the link‐scheduling algorithm using simulations and show that it is able to exploit the spatial diversity provided by the directional antennas to outperform comparable schemes for wireless mesh networks. We also briefly discuss implementation issues to demonstrate the viability of the approach. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Power-controlled medium access for ad hoc networks with directional antennas

Directional antennas have the potential to significantly improve the throughput of a wireless ad hoc network. At the same time, energy consumption can be considerably reduced if the network implements per-packet transmission power control. Typical MAC protocols for ad hoc networks (e.g., the IEEE 802.11 Ad Hoc mode) were designed for wireless devices with omnidirectional antennas. When used with directional antennas, such protocols suffer from several medium access problems, including interference from minor lobes and hidden-terminal problems, which prevent full exploitation of the potential of directional antennas. In this paper, we propose a power-controlled MAC protocol for directional antennas that ameliorates these problems. Our protocol allows for dynamic adjustment of the transmission power for both data and clear-to-send (CTS) packets to optimize energy consumption. It provides a mechanism for permitting interference-limited concurrent transmissions and choosing the appropriate tradeoff between throughput and energy consumption. The protocol enables nodes to implement load control in a distributed manner, whereby the total interference in the neighborhood of a receiver is upper-bounded. Simulation results demonstrate that the combined gain from concurrent transmissions using directional antennas and power control results in significant improvement in network throughput and considerable reduction in energy consumption.     

A Cross-Layer Admission Control Framework for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks using Multiple Antennas

Unlike single omnidirectional antennas, multiple antennas offer wireless ad-hoc networks potential increases in their achievable throughput and capacity. Due to recent advances in antenna technology, it is now affordable to build wireless devices with more than one antenna. As a result, multiple antennas are expected to be an essential part of next-generation wireless networks to support the rapidly emerging multimedia applications characterized by their high and diverse QoS needs. This paper develops an admission control framework that exploits the benefits of multiple antennas to better support applications with QoS requirements in wireless ad-hoc networks. The developed theory provides wireless ad-hoc networks with flow-level admission control capabilities while accounting for cross-layer effects between the PHY and the MAC layers. Based on the developed theory, we propose a mechanism that multiple antenna equipped nodes can use to control flows' admissibility into the network. Through simulation studies, we show that the proposed mechanism results in high flow acceptance rates and high network throughput utilization.     

Simulation and analysis of node throughput using smart antenna in wireless mesh networks

Smart antenna technology is introduced to wireless mesh networks. Smart antennas based wider-range access medium access control (MAC) protocol (SWAMP) is used as MAC protocol for IEEE 802.11 mesh networks in this study. The calculation method of node throughput in chain and arbitrary topology is proposed under nodes fairness guarantee. Network scale and interference among nodes are key factors that influence node throughput. Node distribution pattern near the gateway also affects the node throughput. Experiment based on network simulator-2 (NS-2) simulation platform compares node throughput between smart antenna scenario and omni-antenna scenario. As smart antenna technology reduces the bottle collision domain, node throughput increases observably.     

A Cross-Layer Optimization Framework for Multihop Multicast in Wireless Mesh Networks

The optimal and distributed provisioning of high throughput in mesh networks is known as a fundamental but hard problem. The situation is exacerbated in a wireless setting due to the interference among local wireless transmissions. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimization framework for throughput maximization in wireless mesh networks, in which the data routing problem and the wireless medium contention problem are jointly optimized for multihop multicast. We show that the throughput maximization problem can be decomposed into two subproblems: a data routing subproblem at the network layer, and a power control subproblem at the physical layer with a set of Lagrangian dual variables coordinating interlayer coupling. Various effective solutions are discussed for each subproblem. We emphasize the network coding technique for multicast routing and a game theoretic method for interference management, for which efficient and distributed solutions are derived and illustrated. Finally, we show that the proposed framework can be extended to take into account physical-layer wireless multicast in mesh networks     

Proportional fairness in MAC layer channel access of IEEE 802.11s EDCA based wireless mesh networks

Fairness provisioning in IEEE 802.11s EDCA based Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is a very challenging task due to relayed traffic and traffic load variation among mesh routers. Because of bursty traffic in general purpose community wireless mesh networks, proportional fairness is more suited than max–min fairness, where mesh routers and clients should get channel access proportional to their traffic load. However, proportional fairness is hard to achieve by solving optimization function because of non-linearity and non-concave property of the objective function. In this paper, a probabilistic approach is proposed to provide proportional fairness without solving global non-linear and non-concave optimization. Every mesh node use a load estimation strategy to estimate total traffic load that it needs to forward. The required channel share of a mesh node should be proportional to its traffic load, whereas, the total normalized channel share for all the contending mesh nodes should be kept less than unity to satisfy the clique constraint. The network architecture and contention property in WMN are explored to deduce the required channel share of mesh nodes. A probabilistic approach is used to tune the contention window based on the difference between actual channel share and required channel share, so that the node with more traffic load gets more channel share. A discrete time Markov Chain based modeling is used to deduce the overall network throughput for the proposed scheme. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme works better than the standard IEEE 802.11s based EDCA MAC in terms of fairness and throughput.     

SDMAC: Selectively Directional MAC protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

Using directional antennas in wireless mobile ad hoc networks can greatly improve the transmission range as well as the spatial reuse. However, it will also cause some problems such as deafness problem and hidden terminal problem, which greatly impair the network performance. This paper first proposes a MAC protocol called Selectively Directional MAC (SDMAC) that can effectively address these problems and significantly improve the network throughput. Then two improvements on SDMAC are proposed. The first one is to improve the network throughput by scheduling the packets in the queue (a scheme called Q-SDMAC), thus the head-of-line (HOL) blocking problem can be addressed. The second one is to relax the assumption that each node knows the relative directions of its neighboring nodes and use caches to buffer those relative directions (a scheme named Q-SDMAC using cache). Extensive simulations show that: (1) SDMAC can achieve much better performance than the existing MAC protocols using directional antennas; (2) The network throughput can be significantly improved by scheduling the packets in the queue; (3) Using caches can still achieve high network throughput when nodes are moving; and (4) Network throughput decreases when directional antennas have side lobe gain.

A range-adaptive directional MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks with smart antennas

Using smart antennas in wireless ad hoc networks can offer tremendous potential for improving the network performance. This paper proposes a range-adaptive MAC protocol, called Ra-MAC, for wireless ad hoc networks using smart antennas. In contrast to the previous MAC protocols with only single-fold directional transmission range, we propose to use multi-fold transmission ranges, i.e., LD (Low-distance), MD (Mid-distance) and HD (High-distance), to arrange efficient communications between the senders and receivers. The transmission range is selected dynamically according to the distance between the communicating node-pair. Building on the multiple transmission ranges, we extend directional network allocation vector (DNAV) to range-based DNAV (R-DNAV) to make full use of wireless channels. Moreover, in order to deal with the basic problems (i.e., hidden terminals, deafness and capture) within smart antenna-based wireless networks, we further equip some optimizations such as half-sweeping start of dialog (SOD), extended directional virtual carrier sensing (DVCS) and so on to Ra-MAC, and then detailedly discuss how these optimizations contribute to address the problems. Simulation results indicate that Ra-MAC outperforms the existing directional MAC protocols and 802.11 DCF. Finally, we also make a brief qualitative comparison between all these protocols.     

On Busy-Tone Based MAC Protocol for Wireless Networks with Directional Antennas

The application of directional antennas in wireless ad hoc networks offers numerous benefits, such as the extended communication range, the increased spatial reuse, the improved capacity and the suppressed interference. However, directional antennas can cause new location-dependent carrier sensing problems, such as new hidden terminal and deafness problems, which can severely degrade the network performance. Recently, a few schemes have been proposed to address these problems. However, most of these existing methods can only partially solve the hidden terminal and deafness problems. Some of them even bring significant performance overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol, in terms of the busy-tone based directional medium access control (BT-DMAC) protocol. In BT-DMAC, when the transmission is in progress, the sender and the receiver will turn on their omni-directional busy tones to protect the on-going transmission. Integrating with the directional network allocation vector (DNAV), the scheme can almost mitigate the hidden terminal problem and the deafness problem completely. We then propose an analytical model to investigate the throughput performance of BT-DMAC. The numerical results show that BT-DMAC outperforms other existing directional MAC schemes. We next evaluate the performance of BT-DMAC through extensive simulation experiments. The results show that our proposed BT-DMAC scheme has superior performance to other existing solutions, in terms of higher throughput.     

Energy-Efficient Routing Algorithms Using Directional Antennas for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Power consumption is an important issue in the wireless ad hoc networking environment. In this paper, we present several energy-efficient routing algorithms using directional antennas for wireless ad hoc networks. These algorithms are simple to implement and are distributed and can be applied to mobile environments. We evaluate how directional antennas improve system throughput. We study the influence of the battery recovery effect and mobility on the network throughput during a network lifetime. We also present an algorithm that exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless communication environment to improve end-to-end bit error performance for a Rayleigh fading channel.     

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.     

Distributed spectrum assignment for cognitive networks with heterogeneous spectrum opportunities

This paper presents a distributed and localized interference‐aware channel assignment framework for multi‐radio wireless mesh networks in a cognitive network environment. The availability of multiple interfaces and channels in wireless devices is expected to enhance network throughput in wireless mesh networks. A notable design issue in such networks is how to dynamically assign available channels to multiple radio interfaces for maximizing effective network throughput by minimizing interference. The proposed framework uses a novel interference estimation method by utilizing distributed conflict graphs on a per‐interface basis. Presented results obtained via simulation studies in 802.11 based multi‐radio mesh networks indicate that for both homogeneous and heterogeneous primary networks, the proposed protocol can facilitate a large increase in network throughput in comparison with a Common Channel Assignment mechanism that is used as a benchmark in the literature. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The design of a channel-access protocol for a wireless ad hoc network with sectored directional antennas

A packet scheduler and a medium access control (MAC) protocol are presented for a direct-sequence spread-spectrum, wireless ad hoc network that contains a mix of nodes with directional antennas and nodes with omnidirectional antennas. The scheduler and MAC protocol are designed to prevent the co-site interference problem that arises in some types of nodes employing directional antennas. It is shown that the presence of nodes with directional antennas exacerbates the vulnerability of the network to the receiver blocking problem. A modification of the MAC protocol is presented that mitigates the receiver blocking problem, and it is shown to improve the performance of a network that includes nodes with directional antennas.     

Performance Analysis of Directional CSMA/CA for IEEE 802.15.3c under Saturation Environments

In this paper, the directional carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol in the immediate acknowledgement mode for IEEE 802.15.3c is analyzed under saturation environments. For the analysis, a sensing region and an exclusive region with a directional antenna are computed probabilistically and a Markov chain model in which the features of IEEE 802.15.3c and the effects of using directional antennas are incorporated is analyzed. An algorithm to find the maximal number of concurrently transmittable frames is proposed. The system throughput and the average transmission delay are obtained in closed forms. The numerical results show the impact of directional antennas on the CSMA/CA media access control (MAC) protocol. For instance, the throughput with a small beamwidth of antenna is more than ten times larger than that for an omnidirectional antenna. The overall analysis is verified by a simulation. The obtained results will be helpful in developing an MAC protocol for enhancing the performance of mmWave wireless personal area networks.     

Tone Dual‐Channel MAC Protocol with Directional Antennas for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The directional medium access control (MAC) protocol improves the throughput of mobile ad hoc networks but has a deafness problem and requires location information for neighboring nodes. In the dual‐channel directional MAC protocol [12], the use of omnidirectional packets does not require the exact location of destination node. In this letter, we propose a tone dual‐channel MAC protocol with directional antennas to improve the throughput of mobile ad hoc networks. In the proposed MAC protocol, we use a directional CTS and an out‐of‐band directional DATA tone with a new blocking algorithm to improve the spatial reuse. We confirm the throughput performance of the proposed MAC protocol by computer simulations using the Qualnet simulator.     

DMesh: Incorporating Practical Directional Antennas in Multichannel Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been proposed as an effective solution for ubiquitous last-mile broadband access. Three key factors that affect the usability of WMNs are high throughput, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployability. In this paper, we propose DMesh, a WMN architecture that combines spatial separation from directional antennas with frequency separation from orthogonal channels to improve the throughput of WMNs. DMesh achieves this improvement without inhibiting cost-effectiveness and ease of deployability by utilizing practical directional antennas that are widely and cheaply available (e.g., patch and yagi) in contrast to costly and bulky smart beamforming directional antennas. Thus, the key challenge in DMesh is to exploit spatial separation from such practical directional antennas despite their lack of electronic steerability and interference nulling, as well as the presence of significant sidelobes and backlobes. In this paper, we study how such practical directional antennas can improve the throughput of a WMN. Central to our architecture is a distributed, directional channel assignment algorithm for mesh routers that effectively exploits the spatial and frequency separation opportunities in a DMesh network. Simulation results show that DMesh improves the throughput of WMNs by up to 231% and reduces packet delay drastically compared to a multiradio multichannel omni antenna network. A DMesh implementation in our 16-node 802.11b WMN testbed using commercially available practical directional antennas provides transmission control protocol throughput gains ranging from 31% to 57%     

Improving the multiple access method of home networks over the electrical wiring

Data communications on domestic low-voltage powerlines benefit from an ubiquitous and already existent infrastructure. Nevertheless, high-speed communications on this environment faces obstacles such as attenuation and noise. The HomePlug standard defines Media Access Control (MAC)- and physical (PHY)-layer protocols for home electrical wiring networks. Its MAC protocol has introduced the deferral counter (DC) mechanism, which adapts the contention of the nodes for the medium according to the network load. This article proposes the Contention window Pro-active Increase (CPI) mechanism to enhance the performance of HomePlug. The CPI mechanism is based on DC and improves the HomePlug efficiency by faster increasing the contention window size. As a consequence, there are fewer collisions and the aggregated throughput increases. Under high network load, our simulation results show a tradeoff concerning throughput and jitter. CPI improves HomePlug throughput by up to 3% with no jitter increase and by up to 15% at the cost of additional jitter.     

High-performance architectures for IP-based multihop 802.11 networks

The concept of a forwarding node, which receives packets from upstream nodes and then transmits these packets to downstream nodes, is a key element of any multihop network, wired or wireless. While high-speed IP router architectures have been extensively studied for wired networks, the concept of a "wireless IP router" has not been addressed so far. We examine the limitations of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in supporting a low-latency and high-throughput IP datapath comprising multiple wireless LAN hops. We first propose a wireless IP forwarding architecture that uses MPLS with modifications to 802.11 MAC to significantly improve packet forwarding efficiency. We then study further enhancements to 802.11 MAC that improve system throughput by allowing a larger number of concurrent packet transmissions in multihop 802.11-based IP networks. With 802.11 poised to be the dominant technology for wireless LANs, we believe a combined approach to MAC, packet forwarding, and transport layer protocols is needed to make high-performance multihop 802.11 networks practically viable.     

Cross‐layer optimization for CDMA/TDD wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes a new cross‐layer optimization algorithm for wireless mesh networks (WMNs). CDMA/TDD (code division multiple access/time division duplex) is utilized and a couple of TDD timeslot scheduling schemes are proposed for the mesh network backbone. Cross‐layer optimization involves simultaneous consideration of the signal to interference‐plus‐noise ratio (SINR) at the physical layer, traffic load estimation and allocation at medium access control (MAC) layer, and routing decision at the network layer. Adaptive antennas are utilized by the wireless mesh routers to take advantage of directional beamforming. The optimization formulation is subject to routing constraints and can be solved by general nonlinear optimization techniques. Comparisons are made with respect to the classic shortest‐path routing algorithm in the network layer. The results reveal that the average end‐to‐end successful packet rate (SPR) can be significantly improved by the cross‐layer approach. The corresponding optimized routing decisions are able to reduce the traffic congestion. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.