Angular MAC: a framework for directional antennas in wireless mesh networks

Capacity of wireless mesh networks can be enhanced through the use of smart directional antennas, which not only enable nodes to have high quality links but also increase network throughput by allowing spatial reuse. This paper proposes a new MAC protocol and framework, called Angular MAC (ANMAC) that enables directional antennas in wireless mesh networks. The protocols and algorithms of the ANMAC framework fit well with the requirements of mesh networks such as neighbor discovery and self-configuration, while providing significant throughput enhancements. The throughput enhancements are proven by comprehensive simulations with realistic antenna patterns, including performance comparisons of ANMAC with directional schemes using a similar node architecture and omni 802.11. Also, the effect of contention window size is analyzed and a dynamic contention window adaptation algorithm is proposed to maximize the throughput of the self-configuring mesh network, by taking instantaneous traffic conditions into account.     

Exploiting smart antennas in wireless mesh networks using contention access

Smart antennas can increase the capacity of mesh networks and reduce the susceptibility of individual nodes to interception and jamming, but creating the conditions that allow them to be effective is difficult. In this article we provide a broad review of antenna technologies and identify their capabilities and limitations. We review mechanisms used by medium access control schemes to arbitrate access. These reviews let us identify a small set of conditions that are necessary for smart antenna exploitation. We then review the most common MAC approaches, carrier sense multiple access, slotted aloha, and time-division multiple access, and evaluate their suitability for exploiting smart antennas. We demonstrate that they are not capable of creating the complete set of antenna exploitation conditions while retaining a contention nature. We follow with a discussion of the synchronous collision resolution (SCR) MAC scheme and describe how it creates all the exploitation conditions. We conclude that SCR provides the best support for smart antenna exploitation with the added benefits that there is no requirement for all nodes to be equipped with the same antenna technologies and that smart antennas can be combined with channelization technologies to provide even higher capacities.     

Opportunistic RPL for reliable AMI mesh networks

Driven by the need to improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact, we observe a thrust towards enabling a Smart Grid. It is envisaged that to achieve these goals, the Smart Grid will be equipped with communications infrastructure and mechanisms that will enable near real-time control of the grid components. One of the key elements of the Smart Grid is the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) which is expected to facilitate the transport of meter readings from a smart electricity meter at the customer premises to the utility provider, and control data in the other direction. These communications can be potentially realized by deploying a self-organizing mesh network composed of smart metering nodes connected to concentrator nodes which in turn are connected to the utility provider data management systems. This paper explores a cooperative communications approach to improve reliability of such mesh networks. The proposed opportunistic forwarding protocol called ‘ORPL’ has been realized as an enhancement on top of the routing protocol for low power and lossy networks, a connectivity enabling mechanism in AMI mesh networks. In ORPL, smart meter nodes select multiple candidate relays to facilitate reliable transport of smart metering data to the concentrator node. Moreover, it is designed to work in a distributed manner thereby ensuring scalability. We also present a further extension to ORPL, i.e., ORPLx with adaptive medium access control retransmit limit, which reduces unnecessary retransmissions. Our protocols have been evaluated and verified with comprehensive experimental results, demonstrating their effectiveness and favorable characteristics.     

Performance of MIMO cross‐layer MAC protocol based on antenna selection in ad hoc networks

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a cross‐layer (physical and MAC) design for multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) system that aims at maximizing the throughput of ad hoc networks by selecting the optimum antenna combination. Employing this cross‐layer design is shown to improve the overall network performance relative to the case where no antenna selection (AS) is used. To solve the node blocking problem associated with the IEEE 802.11 medium‐access control (MAC) protocol, the proposed protocol leverage the available degrees of freedom offered by the MIMO system to allow neighboring nodes to simultaneously communicate using the zero‐forcing (ZF) Bell‐labs layered space‐time (BLAST) architecture. Using the cross‐layer design, neighboring nodes share their optimum antenna selection (AS) information through control messages. Given this shared information, nodes set their decisions on the number of selected antennas based on the available spatial channels that guarantees collision‐free transmissions. At the destination node, the ZF receiver is employed to extract the desired user data while treating the data from neighboring users as interference. The performance of the proposed cross‐layer design is examined through simulations, where we show that the network throughput is significantly improved compared to conventional MAC protocols. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Throughput analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled MAC protocol in the presence of hidden nodes

The presence of hidden nodes degrades the performance of wireless networks due to an excessive amount of data frame collisions. The IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is widely used in current wireless sensor networks, does not provide any hidden node avoidance mechanisms and consequently could lead to severe performance degradation in networks with hidden nodes. This paper presents a simple technique based on discrete-time Markov chain analysis to approximate the throughput of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol in the presence of hidden nodes. Using different network configurations, we validate the applicability of the proposed analysis for generic star-topology networks. Based on the analysis, the effects of network size, topology, frame length and frame arrival rate on the throughput of the system are investigated.     

MANETs中智能天线和功率控制的应用

分析了MANETs中基于CDMA的MAC协议存在的问题,提出在协议中引入智能天线和功率控制技术来解决多址干扰和远-近效应等问题.对采用智能天线和功率控制技术的MAC协议的工作原理进行了阐述,并通过仿真评估了智能天线与功率控制技术结合后对网络吞吐量和节点耗能的影响.研究结果表明,在MANETs中使用智能天线和功率控制技术可以有效地提高网络的吞吐量,降低节点的能耗.     

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.     

基于规则与感知的水声网络MAC协议

针对水声网络(UAN)媒体访问控制(MAC)协议采用RTS/CTS握手机制,导致信道利用率和网络吞吐量较低的问题,提出一套信道访问规则,基于该规则设计了节点状态感知的水声网络MAC(RP-MAC)协议.当接收节点不在收发状态,并且其他邻居节点也都不在接收状态时,发送节点才会尝试发送一到多个报文给接收节点.节点通过侦听和...     

Fair MAC protocol for optical ring network of wavelength-shared access nodes

In this paper, a WDM optical ring consisting of access nodes with fixed transmitter-n fixed receivers (FT—FR ⁿ ) is considered. As access nodes share a wavelength channel there is trade-off between node throughput and fairness among them. In order to abbreviate the transmission unfairness and to increase the throughput, we propose p-persistent medium access control (MAC) protocol. Each node uses the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol to transmit packets, and decides whether to use a local empty slot with probability p when a transferred packet based on source-stripping is dropped and emptied. Numerical prediction for the proposed MAC protocol is introduced to compute the maximum node throughput under uniform traffic condition. For more detail results, we use network simulation with self-similar traffic and introduce various results. The proposed MAC protocol gives better node throughput than non-persistent protocol and shows an improved fairness factor than 1-persistent protocol. Through simulation, we also find the reasonable probability of p-persistent protocol for a given architecture.     

Performance of the EY-NPMA Protocol

The throughput of the Elimination Yield Non-pre-emptive Priority Multiple Access (EY-NPMA) protocol, which has been chosen as the medium access control (MAC) protocol for HIPERLAN, is simulated. Connection between users is based on a statistical model of path loss with power law against distance and 6 dB log-normal shadowing. It is shown that the throughput performance of the EY-NPMA protocol in networks of moderate size and with small proportion of hidden nodes is satisfactory. For a fully connected network, the throughput reaches 0.85 at an offered traffic of 1 and remains at this level. The maximum throughput reduces gradually when the number of hidden node pairs in the network is increased. With 11% of hidden nodes in the network the peak throughput falls to 0.6.     

Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) MAC for wireless sensor networks

In this paper we propose high throughput collision free, mobility adaptive and energy efficient medium access protocol (MAC) called Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) for wireless sensor networks. CFMA ensures that transmissions incur no collisions, and allows nodes to undergo sleep mode whenever they are not transmitting or receiving. It uses delay allocation scheme based on traffic priority at each node and avoids allocating same backoff delay for more than one node unless they are in separate clusters. It also allows nodes to determine when they can switch to sleep mode during operation. CFMA for mobile nodes provides fast association between the mobile node and the cluster coordinator. The proposed MAC performs well in both static and mobile scenarios, which shows its significance over existing MAC protocols proposed for mobile applications. The performance of CFMA is evaluated through extensive simulation, analysis and comparison with other mobility aware MAC protocols. The results show that CFMA outperforms significantly the existing CSMA/CA, Sensor Mac (S-MAC), Mobile MAC (MOB-MAC), Adaptive Mobility MAC (AM-MAC), Mobility Sensor MAC (MS-MAC), Mobility aware Delay sensitive MAC (MD-MAC) and Dynamic Sensor MAC (DS-MAC) protocols including throughput, latency and energy consumption.     

A multiple relay‐based medium access control protocol in multirate wireless ad hoc networks with multiple beam antennas

The advanced technique of multiple beam antennas is recently considered in wireless networks to improve the system throughput by increasing spatial reuse, reducing collisions, and avoiding co‐channel interference. The usage of multiple beam antennas is similar to the concept of Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA), while each beam can be treated as a data channel. Wireless networks can increase the total throughput and decrease the transmission latency if the physical layer of a mobile node can support multirate capability. Multirate wireless networks incurs the anomaly problem, because low data rate hosts may influence the original performance of high data rate hosts. In this work, each node fits out multiple beam antennas with multirate capability, and a node can either simultaneously transmit or receive multiple data on multiple beams. Observe that the transmitting or receiving operation does not happen at the same time. In this paper, we propose a multiple relay‐based medium access control (MAC) protocol to improve the throughput for low data rate hosts. Our MAC protocol exploits multiple relay nodes and helps the source and the destination to create more than one data channel to significantly reduce the transmission latency. Observe that low data rate links with long‐distance transmission latencies are distributed by multiple relay nodes, hence the anomaly problem can be significantly alleviated. In addition, the ACK synchronization problem is solved to avoid the condition that source nodes do not receive ACKs from destination nodes. An adjustment operation is presented to reduce unnecessary relay nodes during the fragment burst period. Finally, simulation results illustrate that our multiple relay‐based MAC protocol can achieve high throughput and low transmission latency. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

I-MAC: an incorporation MAC for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes an innovative MAC protocol called I-MAC. Protocol for wireless sensor networks, which combines the advantages of collision tolerance and collision cancellation. The protocol increases the number of antenna in wireless sensor nodes. The purpose is to monitor the occurrence of packet collisions by increasing the number of antenna in real time. The built-in identity structure is used in the frame structure in order to help the sending node to identify the location of the receiving node after a data packet collision is detected. Packets can be recovered from where the conflict occurred. In this way, we can monitor the conflict for a fixed period of time. It can improve the channel utilisation through changing the transmission probability of collision nodes and solve the problem of hidden terminal through collision feedback mechanism. We have evaluated our protocol. Our results show that the throughput of I-MAC is 5 percentage points higher than that of carrier sense multiple access/collision notification. The network utilisation of I-MAC is more than 92%.     

A Unified MAC Layer Framework for Ad-Hoc Networks With Smart Antennas

Smart antennas represent a broad variety of antennas that differ in their performance and transceiver complexity. The superior capabilities of smart antennas, however, can be leveraged only through appropriately designed higher layer network protocols, including at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Although several related works have considered such tailored protocols, they do so in the context of specific antenna technologies. In this paper, we explore the possibility for a unified approach to medium access control in ad hoc networks with smart antennas. We first present a unified representation of the PHY layer capabilities of the different types of smart antennas, and their relevance to MAC layer design. We then define a unified MAC problem formulation, and derive unified MAC algorithms (both centralized and distributed) from the formulation. Finally, using the algorithms developed, we investigate the relative performance trade-offs of the different technologies under varying network conditions. We also analyze theoretically the performance bounds of the different smart antenna technologies when the available gains are exploited for rate increase and communication range increase.     

RIM-MAC：一种适用于水下传感网接收者发起的多会话MAC协议

声通信是水下传感网的主要通信方式之一,但是它具有长延迟和低带宽的特点,这是水下传感网MAC（media access control）协议研究面临的主要挑战。为提高网络吞吐量,提出了一种接收者发起的多会话MAC协议（RIM-MAC）。它利用接收者发起会话,通过一次会话的4次握手完成所有邻居数据分组的传输,有效地减少握手次数。同时利用侦听到的本地信息（邻居延迟图和邻居的传输调度）避免信道冲突并发起多个会话,这解决了长传播延迟带来的信道利用率低的问题。RIM-MAC通过增强节点间并行传输的能力,在接收者和发送者两端提高时空复用率,与经典水下MAC协议比,网络吞吐量提高了至少36%。除此之外,基于自适应数据轮询策略提出了一种网络负载公平算法（FTA）,它保证了网络中竞争节点间的信道访问的公平性。仿真实验表明,在长传播延迟的场景下,RIM-MAC取得了比典型的水下传感网MAC协议更好的吞吐量性能。     

基于MIMO技术的WMN MAC协议研究

分析了MIMO技术中由于通信链路间干扰导致网络吞吐量降低的问题,提出了一种基于多模多信道技术的改进MAC协议(MPRP-MAC),利用节点中的多个通信模块以及多个正交信道资源,使节点可以在无干扰的情况下实现接收与发送同时进行。实验结果表明,该技术可充分利用天线资源,有效提高系统容量。     

A reservation-based multicast protocol for WDM optical star networks

In this paper, we present a reservation-based medium access control (MAC) protocol with multicast support for wavelength-division multiplexing networks. Our system is based on the single-hop, passive optical star architecture. Of the available wavelengths (channels), one channel is designated as a control channel, and the remaining channels are used for data transmission. Each node is equipped with a pair of fixed transceiver to access the control channel, and a fixed transmitter and a tunable receiver to access data channels. For easy implementation of the protocol in hardware and for precisely computing the protocol's processing overhead, we give a register-transfer model of the protocol. We simulate the protocol to study its throughput behavior, and present its analytic model. For a node to be able to send data packets in successive data slots with no time gap between them, in spite of the situation that the protocol's execution time may be longer than data transmission time, we propose the idea of multiple MAC units at each node. Unicast throughput of our protocol reaches the theoretically possible maximum throughput for MAC protocols with distributed control, and the multicast throughput is at least as good as, and even better than, those delivered by existing MAC protocols with distributed control.     

Smart antenna techniques and their application to wireless ad hoc networks

In this article the use of smart antennas in mobile ad hoc and mesh networks is discussed. We first give a brief overview of smart antenna techniques and describe the issues that arise when applying these techniques in ad hoc networks. We consider ad hoc/mesh networks with directional antennas, beamforming/adaptive antennas, and/or multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. We then show how the MAC/routing techniques can be modified to get the maximum benefit with smart antennas, while also showing examples of degradation in system performance, rather than improvement, when smart antenna techniques are added to networks with standard MAC/routing techniques.     

一种联合路由层信息设计的多跳Ad Hoc MAC层协议

提出了一种单信道多跳Ad Hoc网络的媒体接入层协议.利用全向天线的特点,协议控制帧捎带路由信息,使邻居节点获知节点间路由状态.上游节点的ACK应答直接触发下游节点的CTS握手,形成CTS/DATA/ACK三维交互机制.协议可有效减少网络的握手开销,降低重负载时握手帧的冲突概率.仿真表明,协议可适应不同的拓扑.最好情况下,协议较IEEE 802.11协议的吞吐量约提升16.1%,端到端延时约降低16.8%.改善了多跳Ad Hoc网络性能.     

A Wireless MAC Protocol with Collision Detection

The most popular strategies for dealing with packet collisions at the medium access control (MAC) layer in distributed wireless networks use a combination of carrier sensing and collision avoidance. When the collision avoidance strategy fails, such schemes cannot detect collisions and corrupted data frames are still transmitted in their entirety, thereby wasting the channel bandwidth and significantly reducing the network throughput. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new wireless MAC protocol capable of collision detection. The basic idea of the proposed protocol is the use of pulses in an out-of-band control channel for exploring channel condition and medium reservation and achieving both collision avoidance and collision detection. The performance of the proposed MAC protocol has been investigated using extensive analysis and simulations. Our results show that, as compared with existing MAC protocols, the proposed protocol has significant performance gains in terms of node throughput. Additionally, the proposed protocol is fully distributed and requires no time synchronization among nodes.