Arbitration Interframe Space‐controlled Medium Access Control: a medium access control protocol guaranteeing absolute priority in wireless local area networks

The demand for multimedia services, such as voice over Internet Protocol, video on demand, information dissemination, and ?le sharing, is increasing explosively in wireless local area networks. These multimedia services require a certain level of QoS. Thus, it is important to provide QoS for multimedia applications. IEEE 802.11e tries to meet the QoS requirement of multimedia services by using Enhanced Distributed Channel Access. This gives more weights to high‐priority tra?c than low‐priority tra?c in accessing the wireless channel. However, Enhanced Distributed Channel Access suffers from many problems such as low aggregate throughput, high collision rates, and ineffective QoS differentiation among priority classes. In this paper, we propose a new medium access scheme, the Arbitration Interframe Space‐controlled Medium Access Control (AC‐MAC), that guarantees absolute priority in 802.11 wireless networks. In AC‐MAC, the AIFS and contention window values are controlled, so that a higher‐priority tra?c can preferentially access and effectively utilize the channel. Extensive simulations show that AC‐MAC can perfectly provide absolute priority and good throughput performance regardless of the number of contending nodes. In the simulation of voice over Internet Protocol service, AC‐MAC provides effective QoS differentiation among services and also meets the high level of QoS requirements. AC‐MAC also adapts quickly in a dynamic environment and provides good fairness among the nodes belonging to the same priority class. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Design and analysis of low‐power access protocols for wireless and mobile ATM networks

This paper describes the design and analysis of a low‐power medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless/mobile ATM networks. The protocol – denoted EC‐MAC (energy conserving medium access control) – is designed to support different traffic types with quality‐of‐service (QoS) provisions. The network is based on the infrastructure model where a base station (BS) serves all the mobiles currently in its cell. A reservation‐based approach is proposed, with appropriate scheduling of the requests from the mobiles. This strategy is utilized to accomplish the dual goals of reduced energy consumption and quality of service provision over wireless links. A priority round robin with dynamic reservation update and error compensation scheduling algorithm is used to schedule the transmission requests of the mobiles. Discrete‐event simulation has been used to study the performance of the protocol. A comparison of energy consumption of the EC‐MAC to a number of other protocols is provided. This comparison indicates the EC‐MAC has, in general, better energy consumption characteristics. Performance analysis of the proposed protocol with respect to different quality‐of‐service parameters using video, audio and data traffic models is provided. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Performance modeling of asynchronous data transfer methods of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

To satisfy the needs of wireless data networking, study group 802.11 was formed under IEEE project 802 to recommend an international standard for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). A key part of standard are the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol needed to support asynchronous and time bounded delivery of data frames. It has been proposed that unslotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) be the basis for the IEEE 802.11 WLAN MAC protocols. We conduct performance evaluation of the asynchronous data transfer protocols that are a part of the proposed IEEE 802.11 standard taking into account the decentralized nature of communication between stations, the possibility of “capture”, and presence of “hidden” stations. We compute system throughput and evaluate fairness properties of the proposed MAC protocols. Further, the impact of spatial characteristics on the performance of the system and that observed by individual stations is determined. A comprehensive comparison of the access methods provided by the 802.11 MAC protocol is done and observations are made as to when each should be employed. Extensive numerical and simulation results are presented to help understand the issues involved. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Designing a fair scheduling mechanism for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

A fair scheduling mechanism called distributed elastic round robin (DERR) is proposed in this letter for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs operated in a distributed manner. To quantify the fairness, we not only derive its fairness bound, but also observe the fairness through ratios of throughput and weight using a simulation approach. By numerical comparisons among DERR, distributed deficit round robin (DDRR), and IEEE 802.11e, we demonstrate that DERR outperforms the other two mechanisms in performance and fairness.     

Using traffic prediction and estimation of provider revenue for a joint GEO satellite MAC/CAC scheme

Satellite networks present an attractive solution in providing worldwide access to the present and future generation multimedia communication services. However, the burstiness of multimedia traffic and the long propagation delays in Geostationary (GEO) satellite systems call for an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and an equally efficient Call Admission Control (CAC) scheme, in order to provide acceptable Quality of Service (QoS) to multimedia users. This paper proposes a fair and dynamic CAC and MAC framework, named Fair Predictive Resource Reservation Access (FPRRA), which is based on accurate videoconference traffic prediction and makes decisions after taking into account the provider revenue. The framework’s performance is evaluated in comparison to other efficient schemes from the literature.     

A Multi-Hop Resource Reservation Scheme for Seamless Real-Time QoS Guarantee in WiMedia Distributed MAC Protocol

In this paper, a multi-hop range conflict-free resource reservation scheme for UWB (Ultra Wide Band) WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network) with D-MAC (Distributed Medium Access Control) is proposed. Unlike the centralized IEEE 802.15.3 MAC, the D-MAC UWB specified by WiMedia Alliance supports DRP (Distributed Reservation Protocol) mechanism which makes all devices be self-organized and removes the SOP (Simultaneous Operating Piconet) problem, i.e., packet collisions between overlapped piconets in the centralized IEEE 802.15.3 MAC. However, since each device’s mobility perspective in multi-hop environment has not been taken into account in the current WiMedia D-MAC, it may cause a “mobile” hidden node problem. In addition, once a DRP conflict occurs due to the mobile hidden node problem, only one of the DRP reservations involved in that DRP conflict maintains the reserved MASs, while the other DRP reservations must be terminated and DRP negotiations for them have to be re-started although only a few MASs are overlapped. Such DRP termination and renegotiation time delays due to the DRP conflicts can be a critical problem to the mobile devices transceiving real-time QoS traffic streams. Therefore, we propose a mechanism to prevent and resolve multi-hop range DRP conflicts due to each device’s mobility in D-MAC environment and demonstrate its guaranteed Seamless QoS and prioritized real-time QoS performances via numerical analyses.     

无线局域网与无线个域网QoS机制的对比分析

无线局域网(WLAN)和无线个域网(WPAN)技术的发展带来的多媒体业务流量的剧增,使无线网络的资源管理、服务质量(QoS)保障等问题日益突出。传统的媒体访问控制(MAC)协议需要重新设计才能对无线网络的QoS问题进行有效地解决。文中研究了IEEEWLAN和WPAN工作组分别于2002年5月和2003年2月提出的IEEE802.11eD3.0和IEEE802.15.3D16两种协议标准的工作机制并对两者的性能作出了比较分析。     

Infrastructure-based MAC in wireless mobile ad-hoc networks

The IEEE 802.11 standard is the most popular Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area networks. However, in an ad-hoc environment, the Point Coordination Function (PCF), defined in the standard, cannot be readily used. This is due to the fact that there is no central authority to act as a Point Coordinator (PC). Peer-to-peer ad-hoc mode in the IEEE 802.11 standard only implements the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). In this paper, an efficient and on-the-fly infrastructure is created using our proposed Mobile Point Coordinator (MPC) protocol. Based on this protocol, we also develop an efficient MAC protocol, namely MPC–MAC. Our MAC protocol extends the IEEE 802.11 standard for use in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks implementing both the DCF and PCF modes of operation. The goal, and also the challenge, is to achieve QoS delivery and priority access for real-time traffic in ad-hoc wireless environments while maintaining backward compatibility with the IEEE 802.11 standard. The performance of MPC–MAC is compared to the IEEE 802.11 DCF-based MAC without MPC. Simulation experiments show that in all cases the use of PCF benefits real-time packets by decreasing the average delay and the discard ratio. However, this may come at the expense of increasing the average delay for non-real-time data. On the other hand, the discard ratio for both real-time and non-real-time packets improves with the use of PCF. Therefore, our MPC–MAC outperforms the standard DCF IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in multi-hop ad-hoc environments.     

Effect of the contention window size on performance and fairness of the IEEE 802.11 standard

IEEE 802.11 is a widely used standard for MAC and PHY layers of WLANs. Unfortunately, the access methods offered in this standard cannot support QoS (Quality of Service) for real-time traffics. Using multimedia applications over WLANs is increasing and, on the other hand, it seems that the access methods employed in this standard causes high variations in delay or jitter and wastes bandwidth due to collisions. There are many methods to enable DCF—basic access method in 802.11—with service differentiation and QoS. The difficulty in majority of these methods is unfair bandwidth allocation among low and high priority traffics at high loads resulting starvation for low priority traffics. In this paper, we modify the way that the CW (Contention Window) size is calculated after a successful transmission and study the effect of the CW size on performance and fairness. Results of our simulations show that the performance of DCF with this modification is better, specially, for traffics in which throughput is the most important parameter. Besides, this method provides better fairness among low and high priority traffics. We also employ a scheme to enable 802.11 with service differentiation which grants dynamic priority to low priority traffics to prevent starvation, specially, in high loads.     

Scheduling in IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX networks: key issues and a survey

Interest in broadband wireless access (BWA) has been growing due to increased user mobility and the need for data access at all times. IEEE 802.16e based WiMAX networks promise the best available quality of experience for mobile data service users. Unlike wireless LANs, WiMAX networks incorporate several quality of service (QoS) mechanisms at the Media Access Control (MAC) level for guaranteed services for data, voice and video. The problem of assuring QoS is basically that of how to allocate available resources among users in order to meet the QoS criteria such as delay, delay jitter and throughput requirements. IEEE standard does not include a standard scheduling mechanism and leaves it for implementer differentiation. Scheduling is, therefore, of special interest to all WiMAX equipment makers and service providers. This paper discusses the key issues and design factors to be considered for scheduler designers. In addition, we present an extensive survey of recent scheduling research. We classify the proposed mechanisms based on the use of channel conditions. The goals of scheduling are to achieve the optimal usage of resources, to assure the QoS guarantees, to maximize goodput and to minimize power consumption while ensuring feasible algorithm complexity and system scalability.     

A USER－DEPENDENT PERFECT－SCHEDULING MULTIPLE ACCESS PROTOCOL FOR VOICE－DATA INTEGRATION IN WIRELESS NETWORKDS

A novel Multiple Access Control(MAC) protocol-User-dependent Perfect-scheduling Multiple Access(UPMA) protocol,which supports joint transmission of voice and data packets,is proposed.By this protocol,the bandwidth can be allocated dynamically to the uplink and downlink traffic with on-demand assignment and the transmission of Mobile Terminals(MTs) can be perfectly scheduled by means of polling.Meanwhile.a unique frame stucture is designed to guarantee Quality of Service(QoS) in voice traffic supporting.An effective colision resolution algorthm is also proposed to guarantee rapid channel access for activated MTs.Finally,performance of UPMA protocol is evaluated by simulation and compared with MPRMA protocol.Simulation results show that UPMA protocol has better performance.     

A preamble-based approach for providing quality of service support in wireless sensor networks

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are usually designed as random access protocols that apply different kinds of backoff strategies since Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based protocols with admission control are very complex and require additional mechanisms for synchronization. Without such mechanisms, fair or priority based medium access with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees can hardly be achieved by existing protocols. Therefore, we developed a random access protocol which uses a new preamble-based medium access strategy that enables collision-free priority based access without the need of synchronization. In this paper we introduce different QoS strategies and their use cases. All strategies can be easily integrated in our protocol to meet the requirements of different target applications. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the strategies with a typical carrier-sense based protocol.     

Design of MAC protocols with fast collision resolution for wireless local area networks

Development of efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols providing both high throughput performance for data traffic and good quality of service (QoS) support for real-time traffic is the current major focus in distributed contention-based MAC protocol research. In this paper, we propose an efficient contention resolution algorithm for wireless local area networks, namely, the fast collision resolution (FCR) algorithm. The MAC protocol with this new algorithm attempts to provide significantly higher throughput performance for data services than the IEEE 802.11 MAC algorithm and more advanced dynamic tuning backoff (DTB) algorithm. We demonstrate that this algorithm indeed resolves collisions faster and reduces the idle slots more effectively. To provide good fairness performance and to support good QoS for real-time traffic, we incorporate the self-clocked fair queueing algorithm and a priority scheme into the FCR algorithm and come up with the real-time FCR (RT-FCR) algorithm, and show that RT-FCR can simultaneously achieve high throughput and good fairness performance for nonreal-time traffic while maintaining satisfactory QoS support for real-time traffic.     

Providing Throughput Guarantees in 802.11e WLAN Through a Dynamic Priority Assignment Mechanism

Supporting real-time and interactive traffic in addition to traditional data traffic with a best-effort nature represents a constantly rising need in any kind of telecommunications environment. The IEEE 802.11 based WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) environment does not represent an exception. This is why at different protocol layers, and primarily at the MAC layer, many efforts are being put by both the research community and the standardization bodies to design effective mechanisms for user QoS (Quality of Service) differentiation. Although early results are coming into sight, such as, for example, the IEEE 802.11e standard release, still a thorough research activity is required. Aim of the present paper is to contribute to the cited research issue by proposing an improvement to the “static” traffic prioritisation mechanism foreseen by the IEEE 802.11e MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol. This latter shows a twofold drawback. First, there is no certainty that QoS requirements relevant to a given application are always fulfilled by the “statically” associated priority. Second, resource requests of the applications are not adapted to the (usually highly) variable traffic conditions of a distributed WLAN environment. The algorithm we propose is specifically tailored to “dynamically” assign 802.11e MAC priorities, depending on both application QoS requirements and observed network congestion conditions. It is carefully designed, implemented into a system simulation tool, and its highly effective behaviour assessed under variable traffic and system conditions. Antonio Iera graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Calabria, Italy, in 1991 and received a Master Diploma in Information Technology from CEFRIEL/Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1992 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Calabria, Italy, in 1996. From 1994 to 1995 he has been at the Mobile Network Division Research Center, Siemens AG Muenchen, Germany to participate to the CEC Project “RACE II 2084 ATDMA (Advanced TDMA Mobile Access)” under a “Commission of European Communities Fellowship Contract in RACE Mobility Action”. He has been with the University of Reggio Calabria, Italy, from 1997 to 2000 as Assistant Professor, and from 2001 to 2005 as Associate Professor. Currently, he is Full Professor of Telecommunications at the same University. In 1995 and in 1996 he has been the recipient of an IEEE Paper Award for the papers presented at the IEEE International Conference on Universal Personal Communications ICUPC'95, and an IEICE/IEEE Outstanding Paper Award for the paper presented at the IEEE ATM Workshop'99, respectively. He served as member of Technical Program Committees of several International Conferences, and in 2003 he has been co-Guest Editor for the special issue “QoS in Next-generation Wireless Multimedia Communications Systems” in the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine. His research interests include QoS control and resource management in Personal Communications Systems and Enhanced Wireless and Satellite Systems. Giuseppe Ruggeri received the degree in electronics engineering from the University of Catania, Italy, in 1998. He received the Ph.D. degree in electronics, computer science and telecommunications engineering with a dissertation on “Advanced Methods to Improve the QoS in VoIP Systems Based on VBR Speech Coders”. His interests include the field of adaptive-rate voice transmission for IP Telephony applications, and support of Quality of Service in heterogeneous wireless networks and WLAN-3G interconnection-integration . He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Electronic and transportation systems (DIMET) at the University “Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria. His mail address is ruggeri@ing.unirc.it. Domenico Tripodi received M.S. degree (cum laude) in electronic engeneering from the University ‘Mediterranea' of Reggio Calabria, Italy in 2003. He won a post-degree scholarship from CNIT in 2004, and he is currently at CNIT Research Unit of Reggio Calabria. His reasearch interest are in the area of QoS provisioning in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks.     

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 Hybrid Collision Avoidance Scheme for Ad Hoc Networks

A novel hybrid collision avoidance scheme that combines both sender-initiated and receiver-initiated collision-avoidance handshake is proposed for multi-hop ad hoc networks. The new scheme is compatible with the popular IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol and involves only some additional queue management and book-keeping work. Simulations of both UDP- and TCP-based applications are conducted with the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, a measurement-based fair scheme and the new scheme. It is shown that the new scheme can alleviate the fairness problem with almost no degradation in throughput. More importantly, it is shown that without explicit information exchange among nodes, the fairness problem cannot be solved conclusively if reasonable throughput is to be maintained. Hence it calls for further work to integrate the new collision avoidance scheme with other schemes that approximate fair queueing and use more contention information in channel access to achieve some QoS assurances in ad hoc networks.     

Dynamic Resource Allocation Architecture for IEEE802.16e: Design and Performance Analysis

Mobile communications has witnessed an exponential increase in the amount of users, services and applications. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) targets to provide broadband connectivity to wide area coverage, both in fixed and in mobile environments, as well as in the provision of QoS constraints of those applications and services envisioned for Next Generation Networks (NGNs), which results in significant design challenges in the MAC (Medium Access Control) to provide the seamless transport of heterogeneous traffic in a cost-effective manner. This paper proposes a Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) architecture for the IEEE802.16e broadband wireless system (also known as Mobile WiMAX) that can provide operators the flexibility to deliver broadband traffic with high spectral efficiency. The proposed DRA architecture framework encompasses scheduler, Link Adaptation (LA), Resource Allocation (RA) and Hybrid Automated Repeat Request (HARQ) functional blocks which interwork seamlessly. The performance of the DRA was evaluated using commonly deployed scheduling policies: Max C/I, Proportional Fair and Round Robin schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed DRA scheme has the capacity to provide enhanced coverage and QoS provisioning for the area networks (WANs), such as the ones envisioned for B3G mobile wireless networks.     

Flow rank based probabilistic fair scheduling for wireless ad hoc networks

Fair scheduling is an ideal candidate for fair bandwidth sharing and thereby achieving fairness among the contending flows in a network. It is particularly challenging for ad hoc networks due to infrastructure free operation and location dependent contentions. As there is no entity to serve coordination among nodes, we need a mechanism to overcome inherent unreliability of the network to provide reduced collision and thereby higher throughput and adequate fair allocation of the shared medium among different contending flows. This paper proposes a flow rank based probabilistic fair scheduling technique. The main focus is to reduce the collision probability among the contending flows while maintaining the prioritized medium access for those flows, which ensures a weighted medium access control mechanism based on probabilistic round robin scheduling. Each flow maintains a flow-table upon which the rank is calculated and backoff value is assigned according to the rank of the flow, i.e., lower backoff interval to lower ranked flow. However, flow-table instability due to joining of a new flow, partially backlogged flow, hidden terminal and partially overlapped region exhibits a challenging problem that needs to be mitigated for our mechanism to work properly. We take appropriate measures to make the flow-table stabilized under such scenarios. Results show that our mechanism achieves better throughput and fairness compared to IEEE 802.11 MAC and existing ones.     

Improving Quality of Service and Assuring Fairness in WLAN Access Networks

As public deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs) has increased and various applications with different service requirements have emerged, fairness and quality of service (QoS) are two imperative issues in allocating wireless channels. This study proposes a fair QoS agent (FQA) to simultaneously provide per-class QoS enhancement and per-station fair channel sharing in WLAN access networks. FQA implements two additional components above the 802.11 MAC: a dual service differentiator and a service level manager. The former is intended to improve QoS for different service classes by differentiating service with appropriate scheduling and queue management algorithms, while the latter is to assure fair channel sharing by estimating the fair share for each station and dynamically adjusting the service levels of packets. FQA assures (weighted) fairness among stations in terms of channel access time without decreasing channel utilization. Furthermore, it can provide quantitative service assurance in terms of queuing delay and packet loss rate. FQA neither resorts to any complex fair scheduling algorithm nor requires maintaining per-station queues. Since the FQA algorithm is an add-on scheme above the 802.11 MAC, it does not require any modification of the standard MAC protocol. Extensive ns-2 simulations confirm the effectiveness of the FQA algorithm with respect to the per class QoS enhancement and per-station fair channel sharing     

无线城域网中关键技术的研究

介绍了无线城域网空中接口规范IEEE802.16标准,重点分析了媒体访问控制(MAC)层和物理层中的关键技术,以及标准中的QoS保证机制.