Towards providing optimal energy‐efficiency and throughput for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless network standard has become one of the most used wireless networking technologies for smart devices as it offers mobility support and low cost deployment. However, these devices deeply rely on the energy provided by their batteries, which results in limited running time. IEEE 802.11 network standard provides stations with carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance for the medium access. Yet it results in stations to consume an important amount of power. Therefore, minimizing WiFi‐based energy consumption in smart devices has been received substantial attention in both academia and industry. Accordingly, this paper * proposes a novel beacon‐based energy‐efficient collision‐free medium access control protocol for any type of IEEE 802.11 stations, regardless of being stationary or mobile, or having different amount of traffic flow, transmission rates, or traffic types. The proposed scheme is valid for all types of low or wide bandwidth, single or multiuser multiple‐input multiple‐output WLAN channels, such as IEEE 802.11a\b\g\n\ac. In the proposed scheme, energy saving is achieved, enabling stations to transmit on the right time and maintaining stations in the doze state during a predetermined sleep_time interval after each successful frame transmission, by making use of modified control and management frames of the standard IEEE 802.11 protocol. The proposed scheme reduces the probability of collisions and may allow stations to enter the collision‐free state, regardless of the number of stations on the channel and their traffic types. Widespread simulations have been executed to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly increases overall throughput and reduces power consumption of stations over IEEE 802.11 WLANs.     

On the impact of IEEE 802.11 MAC on traffic characteristics

IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) is gaining widespread popularity as a layer-2 protocol for wireless local-area networks. While efforts have been made previously to evaluate the performance of various protocols in wireless networks and to evaluate the capacity of wireless networks, very little is understood or known about the traffic characteristics of wireless networks. In this paper, we address this issue and first develop an analytic model to characterize the interarrival time distribution of traffic in wireless networks with fixed base stations or ad hoc networks using the 802.11 MAC. Our analytic model and supporting simulation results show that the 802.11 MAC can induce pacing in the traffic and the resulting interarrival times are best characterized by a multimodal distribution. This is a sharp departure from behavior in wired networks and can significantly alter the second order characteristics of the traffic, which forms the second part of our study. Through simulations, we show that while the traffic patterns at the individual sources are more consistent with long-range dependence and self-similarity, in contrast to wired networks, the aggregate traffic is not self-similar. The aggregate traffic is better classified as a multifractal process and we conjecture that the various peaks of the multimodal interarrival time distribution have a direct contribution to the differing scaling exponents at various timescales.     

Airtime Fairness for IEEE 802.11 Multirate Networks

Under a multirate network scenario, the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC fails to provide airtime fairness for all competing stations since the protocol is designed for ensuring max-min throughput fairness. As such, the maximum achievable throughput by any station gets bounded by the slowest transmitting peer. In this paper, we present an analytical model to study the delay and throughput characteristics of such networks so that the rate anomaly problem of IEEE DCF multirate networks could be mitigated. We call our proposal time fair CSMA (TFCSMA) which utilizes an interesting baseline property for estimating a target throughput for each competing station so that its minimum contention window could be adjusted in a distributed manner. As opposed to the previous work in this area, TFCSMA is ideally suited for practical scenarios where stations frequently adapt their data rates to changing channel conditions. In addition, TFCSMA also accounts for packet errors due to the time varying properties of the wireless channel. We thoroughly compare the performance of our proposed protocol with IEEE 802.11 and other existing protocols under different network scenarios and traffic conditions. Our comprehensive simulations validate the efficacy of our method toward providing high throughput and time fair channel allocation.     

Exploiting the channel using uninterrupted collision‐free MAC adaptation over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) have reached an important stage and become a common technology for wireless access due to its low cost, ease of deployment, and mobility support. In parallel with the extensive growth of WLANs, the development of an efficient medium access control protocol that provides both high throughput performance for data traffic and quality of service support for real‐time applications has become a major focus in WLAN research. The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Functions (DCF/EDCA) provide contention‐based distributed channel access mechanisms for stations to share the wireless medium. However, performance of these mechanisms may drop dramatically because of high collision probabilities as the number of active stations increases. In this paper, we propose an adaptive collision‐free MAC adaptation. The proposed scheme prevents collisions and allows stations to enter the collision‐free state regardless of the traffic load (saturated or unsaturated) and the number of stations on the medium. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme dramatically enhances the overall throughput and supports quality of service for real‐time services over 802.11‐based WLANs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种提高802.11无线Ad Hoc网络公平性的新机制-FFMA

实现多个数据流对无线信道的公平共享是802.11无线Ad Hoc网络中的一个重要议题,但802.11DCF机制在无线Ad Hoc网络中存在严重的公平性问题,甚至有可能出现单个节点或数据流独占信道而其他节点和数据流处于"饥饿"状态的情况.论文提出了一种新颖的保证数据流间公平性的MAC层接入机制FFMA(Flow rate-based Fair Medium Access),通过公平调度和公平竞争的方式,FFMA能够在数据流间公平地分配信道带宽资源.仿真结果表明,在无线Ad Hoc网络中,FFMA可以在保证信道吞吐量的前提下取得远优于802.11 DCF的数据流间的公平性.     

Enhancing Fairness for Short-Lived TCP Flows in 802.11b WLANs

The problem of providing throughput fairness in a wired-cum-wireless network where the wireless portion is an 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is addressed. Due to the distributed nature of the primary 802.11 media access control protocol and the unpredictability of the wireless channel, quality of service guarantees in general and fairness in particular are hard to achieve in WLANs. This fact seriously compromises the interaction between 802.11-based networks and well-established architectures such as DiffServ. The focus of this paper is on transmission control protocol (TCP) traffic, and two fundamental problems related to throughput fairness are identified. First, the basic requirement of providing fair access to all users conflicts with the nature of TCP, which is fair only under certain conditions and hardly met by 802.11b WLANs. Second, short-lived TCP flows that are sensitive to losses during the early stages of TCP window growth need to be protected. To address these issues, a logical-link-control-layer algorithm that can be implemented at both access points and wireless stations is proposed. The algorithm aims at guaranteeing fair access to the medium to every user, independent of their channel conditions. At the same time, the proposed scheme protects short-lived flows, while they strive to get past the critical "small window regime." A simulation study that shows the effectiveness of the new algorithm in comparison to the standard 802.11b implementation is presented     

车载网络IEEE 802.11p协议的特性研究

为了深入探讨车载网络协议IEEE 802.11p的特性,首先对该协议的物理层、媒体控制访问层及其帧结构进行了详细介绍,然后从工作频率、传输速率及最大功耗等方面与其他短距离无线通信技术进行对比分析,最后归纳出车载网络协议IEEE 802.11p作为一项新的协议标准,在车载网络的实际应用中有着区别于其他无线通信技术的特有优势。因此,对该协议的突破性研究,将有助于车载网络技术在智能交通系统领域走向实用,既具有一定的理论意义,又具有重要的应用前景。     

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.     

E‐MAC: an elastic MAC layer for IEEE 802.11 networks

We present a system for real‐time traffic support in infrastructure and ad hoc IEEE 802.11 networks. The proposed elastic MAC (E‐MAC) protocol provides a distributed transmission schedule for stations with real‐time traffic requirements, while allowing a seamless coexistence with standard IEEE 802.11 clients, protecting best‐effort 802.11 traffic from starvation by means of admission control policies. Our scheduling decisions are based on an ‘elastic’ transmission opportunity (TXOP) assignment which allows for efficient wireless resource usage: whenever a real‐time station does not use the assigned TXOP, the other real‐time stations can take over the unused access opportunity, thus preventing the well‐known inefficiencies of static time division multiple access (TDMA) schemes. Unlike other TDMA‐based solutions for 802.11, E‐MAC does not require a tight synchronization among the participating clients, thus allowing its implementation on commodity WLAN hardware via minor software changes at the client side, and no changes at the access points (APs). We studied the performance of our mechanism via ns‐2 simulations and a mathematical model, showing that it outperforms IEEE 802.11e in terms of throughput, delay, and jitter. We finally provide a proof of concept through the results obtained in a real testbed where we implemented the E‐MAC protocol. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MiFi: a framework for fairness and QoS assurance for current IEEE 802.11 networks with multiple access points

In this paper, we present a framework for providing fair service and supporting quality of service (QoS) requirements in IEEE 802.11 networks with multiple access points (APs). These issues becomes critical as IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN are widely deployed in nationwide networks, linking tens of thousands of "hot-spots" for providing both real-time (voice) and non real-time (data) services to a large population of mobile users. However, both fairness and QoS guarantees cannot be supported in the current 802.11 standard. Our system, termed MiFi, relies on centralized coordination of the APs. During any given time of the "contention-free" period only a set of non-interfering APs is activated while the others are silenced. Moreover, the amount of service granted to an AP is proportional to its load and the system's performance is optimized by employing efficient scheduling algorithms. We show that such a system can be implemented without requiring any modification of the underlying MAC protocol standard or the behavior of the mobile stations. Our scheme is complementary to the emerging 802.11e standard for QoS and guarantees to overcome the hidden node and the overlapping cell problems. Our simulations establish that the system supports fairness and hence can provide QoS guarantees for real-time traffic, while maintaining a relative high throughput.     

Enhanced high‐performance distributed coordination function for IEEE 802.11 multi‐rate LANs

To compensate for the effects of fading in wireless channels, IEEE 802.11 systems utilize a rate‐adaptation mechanism to accomplish a multi‐rate capability. However, the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function results in a fundamental performance anomaly in multi‐rate networks; namely, when stations with different transmission rates collide, the throughput performance of the high‐rate station is significantly degraded by the relatively longer channel occupancy time of the low‐rate station. This study resolves this problem through the use of an enhanced high‐performance distributed coordination function (EHDCF) protocol. While most existing solutions to the multi‐rate performance anomaly problem have the form of simple contention‐based protocols, EHDCF has two modes, namely a contending mode and an active mode. In the proposed protocol, new stations joining the network are assigned a contending mode, but switch to an active node (and are therefore permitted to transmit data packets) as soon as they have gained access to the channel. Having transmitted a data packet, the active node then selects the next transmission station in accordance with a probability‐based rule designed such that the high‐rate stations within the network receive a greater number of transmission opportunities than the low‐rate stations. The simulation results show that the EHDCF protocol not only yields a significant improvement in the network throughput but also guarantees the temporal fairness of all the stations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Implementation of enhanced forward pointer-based mobility management scheme for handling internet and intranet traffic in wireless mesh network

To implement WMN, IEEE 802.11s has been developed. The routing protocol for selecting a path between two mesh stations in IEEE 802.11s is hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP). But mobility of external stations has not been considered in IEEE 802.11s. For handling movement of clients, many mobility management schemes have been proposed. Some of such schemes are: ANT, Mesh Mobility Management (M\(^{3})\), Infrastructure Mesh (iMesh), SMesh, MEsh networks with MObility management (MEMO), Wireless mesh Mobility Management (WMM), Static Anchor Scheme, Dynamic Anchor Scheme, LMMesh, Session-to-Mobility-Ratio based Scheme and Forward Pointer-Based Mobility Management Scheme (FPBR). But none of the schemes except FPBR have been integrated with IEEE 802.11s for providing mobility support to the external stations. FPBR has been proposed to enhance IEEE 802.11s for providing mobility support to external stations, but it can support internet traffic only. In WMN both internet and intranet traffic to and from the external station is important. In this paper, an improved version of FPBR named Enhanced FPBR (EFPBR) Scheme has been introduced to handle both internet and intranet traffic. Both EFPBR and HWMP have been numerically analyzed. HWMP and EFPBR schemes are simulated and the performances are compared. From the performance comparison, it can be observed that EFPBR performs better than that of IEEE 802.11s concerning throughput, end-to-end delay, routing overhead and average handoff cost. The number of route management packets transferred per handoff measured from numerical analysis and simulation has also been compared.     

Performance evaluation of multihop ad hoc WLANs

Ongoing technological advances in portable devices, coupled with the need for continuous connectivity while mobile, have made ad hoc networks a compelling research and development topic, particularly in a challenging multimedia multihop scenario. The ability of IEEE 802.11's ad hoc mode of operation, as a dominating wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol, to serve multihop networks requires thorough investigation. In this article, through considering crucial real-life physical phenomena and avoiding as many confining assumptions as possible, system performance measures such as delay and packet failure rate are evaluated. As a result, the importance of adequate selection of the system parameters toward performance improvement is underscored. Moreover, the simulation results imply that by complementing through priority provisions, coordination, route reservation, clustering, and optimum channel coding considerations, the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol can survive in a multihop scenario. The custom simulation environment developed features modularity, comprising traffic generator, mobility, wireless channel, and IEEE 802.11 protocol modules, and is capable of accommodating many more of the physical phenomena involved.     

A wireless MAC protocol using implicit pipelining

In distributed multiple access control protocols, two categories of overhead are usually associated with contention resolution. One is channel idle overhead, where all contending stations are waiting to transmit. Another is collision overhead, which occurs when multiple contending stations attempt to transmit simultaneously. Either idle overhead or collision overhead being large, contention resolution algorithm would be inefficient. Prior research work tries to minimize both the idle and the collision overheads using various methods. In this paper, we propose to apply "pipelining" techniques to the design of multiple access control protocol so that channel idle overhead could be (partially) hidden and the collision overhead could be reduced. While the concept of pipelined scheduling can be applied to various MAC protocol designs in general, in this paper, we focus on its application to IEEE 802.11 DCF. In particular, an implicitly pipelined dual-stage contention resolution MAC protocol (named DSCR) is proposed. With IEEE 802.11, the efficiency of contention resolution degrades dramatically with the increasing load due to high probability of collision. Using the implicit pipelining technique, DSCR hides the majority of channel idle time and reduces the collision probability, hence, improves channel utilization, average access delay, and access energy cost over 802.11 significantly both in wireless LANs and in multihop networks. The simulation results, as well as some analysis, are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of DSCR.     

An enhancement to the IEEE 802.11e EDCA providing QoS guarantees

One of the challenges that must be overcome to realize the practical benefits of ad hoc networks is quality of service (QoS). However, the IEEE 802.11 standard, which undeniably is the most widespread wireless technology of choice for WLANs and ad hoc networks, does not address this issue. In order to support applications with QoS requirements, the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard enhances the original IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol by introducing a new coordination function which has both contention-based and contention-free medium access methods. In this paper, we consider the contention-based medium access method, the EDCA, and propose an extension to it such that it can be used to provide QoS guarantees in WLANs operating in ad hoc mode. Our solution is fully distributed, uses admission control to regulate the usage of resources and gives stations with high-priority traffic streams an opportunity to reserve time for collision-free access to the medium.     

Busy tone contention protocol: a new high‐throughput and energy‐efficient wireless local area network medium access control protocol using busy tone

Design of an efficient wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol is a challenging task due to the time‐varying characteristics of wireless communication channel and different delay requirements in diverse applications. To support variable number of active stations and varying network load conditions, random access MAC protocols are employed. Existing wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol (IEEE 802.11) is found to be inefficient at high data rates because of the overhead associated with the contention resolution mechanism employed. The new amendments of IEEE 802.11 that support multimedia traffic (IEEE 802.11e) are at the expense of reduced data traffic network efficiency. In this paper, we propose a random access MAC protocol called busy tone contention protocol (BTCP) that uses out‐of‐band signals for contention resolution in WLANs. A few variants of this protocol are also proposed to meet the challenges in WLAN environments and application requirements. The proposed BTCP isolate multimedia traffics from background data transmissions and gives high throughput irrespective of the number of contending stations in the network. As a result, in BTCP, admission control of multimedia flows becomes simple and well defined. Studies of the protocol, both analytically and through simulations under various network conditions, have shown to give better performance in comparison with the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low-latency mobile IP handoff for infrastructure-mode wireless LANs

The increasing popularity of IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (LANs) lends them credibility as a viable alternative to third-generation (3G) wireless technologies. Even though wireless LANs support much higher channel bandwidth than 3G networks, their network-layer handoff latency is still too high to be usable for interactive multimedia applications such as voice over IP or video streaming. Specifically, the peculiarities of commercially available IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN hardware prevent existing mobile Internet protocol (IP) implementations from achieving subsecond Mobile IP handoff latency when the wireless LANs are operating in the infrastructure mode, which is also the prevailing operating mode used in most deployed IEEE 802.11b LANs. In this paper, we propose a low-latency mobile IP handoff scheme that can reduce the handoff latency of infrastructure-mode wireless LANs to less than 100 ms, the fastest known handoff performance for such networks. The proposed scheme overcomes the inability of mobility software to sense the signal strengths of multiple-access points when operating in an infrastructure-mode wireless LAN. It expedites link-layer handoff detection and speeds up network-layer handoff by replaying cached foreign agent advertisements. The proposed scheme strictly adheres to the mobile IP standard specification, and does not require any modifications to existing mobile IP implementations. That is, the proposed mechanism is completely transparent to the existing mobile IP software installed on mobile nodes and wired nodes. As a demonstration of this technology, we show how this low-latency handoff scheme together with a wireless LAN bandwidth guarantee mechanism supports undisrupted playback of remote video streams on mobile stations that are traveling across wireless LAN segments.     

Does the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol work well in multihop wireless adhoc networks?

The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is the standard for wireless LANs; it is widely used in testbeds and simulations for wireless multihop ad hoc networks. However, this protocol was not designed for multihop networks. Although it can support some ad hoc network architecture, it is not intended to support the wireless mobile ad hoc network, in which multihop connectivity is one of the most prominent features. In this article we focus on the following question: can the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol function well in multihop networks? By presenting several serious problems encountered in an IEEE 802.11-based multihop network and revealing the in-depth cause of these problems, we conclude that the current version of this wireless LAN protocol does not function well in multihop ad hoc networks. We thus doubt whether the WaveLAN-based system is workable as a mobile ad hoc testbed     

Quality-of-service provisioning system for multimedia transmission in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11, the standard of wireless local area networks (WLANs), allows the coexistence of asynchronous and time-bounded traffic using the distributed coordination function (DCF) and point coordination function (PCF) modes of operations, respectively. In spite of its increasing popularity in real-world applications, the protocol suffers from the lack of any priority and access control policy to cope with various types of multimedia traffic, as well as user mobility. To expand support for applications with quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, the 802.11E task group was formed to enhance the original IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, the problem of choosing the right set of MAC parameters and QoS mechanism to provide predictable QoS in IEEE 802.11 networks remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose a polling with nonpreemptive priority-based access control scheme for the IEEE 802.11 protocol. Under such a scheme, modifying the DCF access method in the contention period supports multiple levels of priorities such that user handoff calls can be supported in wireless LANs. The proposed transmit-permission policy and adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme derive sufficient conditions such that all the time-bounded traffic sources satisfy their time constraints to provide various QoS guarantees in the contention free period, while maintaining efficient bandwidth utilization at the same time. In addition, our proposed scheme is provably optimal for voice traffic in that it gives minimum average waiting time for voice packets. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. As it turns out, our design indeed provides a good performance in the IEEE 802.11 WLAN's environment, and can be easily incorporated into the hybrid coordination function (HCF) access scheme in the IEEE 802.11e standard.     

UPCF: a new point coordination function with QoS and power management for multimedia over wireless LANs

In this paper, we propose a new novel polling-based medium access control protocol, named UPCF (Unified Point Coordination Function), to provide power conservation and quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for multimedia applications over wireless local area networks. Specifically, UPCF has the following attractive features. First, it supports multiple priority levels and guarantees that high-priority stations always join the polling list earlier than low-priority stations. Second, it provides fast reservation scheme such that associated stations with real-time traffic can get on the polling list in bounded time. Third, it employs dynamic channel time allocation scheme to support CBR/VBR transportation and provide per-flow probabilistic bandwidth assurance. Fourth, it employs the power management techniques to let mobile stations save as much energy as possible. Fifth, it adopts the mobile-assisted admission control technique such that the point coordinator can admit as many newly flows as possible while not violating QoS guarantees made to already-admitted flows. The performance of UPCF is evaluated through both analysis and simulations. Simulation results do confirm that, as compared with the PCF in IEEE 802.11, UPCF not only provides higher goodput and energy throughput, but also achieves lower power consumption and frame loss due to delay expiry. Last but not least, we expect that UPCF can pass the current Wi-Fi certification and may coexist with the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard.