Study on bandwidth control for multiple transmission rates in IEEE 802.11e EDCAF

IEEE 802.11e supports the guaranteed quality of service (QoS) by providing different transmission priorities. IEEE 802.11e improves the media access control layer of IEEE 802.11 to satisfy the different QoS requirements by introducing two channel access functions: the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) and the hybrid coordination function (HCF) controlled channel access (HCCA). Signal quality may affect the available bandwidth and transmission rate, because the characteristic of communication channel in wireless environment is in random time‐variation manner. Generally a station using a lower transmission rate will occupy communication channel for a longer time and degrade system performance, which causes unfairness and cannot provide the guaranteed QoS for the stations with higher transmission rates. We propose a bandwidth control scheme (BCS) by combining the IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access function (EDCAF) protocol to overcome the guaranteed bandwidth issue in multirate environments. A multirate discrete Markov chain model is analyzed for the multirate transmission system in this paper. According to the obtained results, BCS improves performance especially in throughput and makes the different QoS requirements be processed efficiently and flexibly. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

IEEE802.11无线网络中一种新的切换技术

作为当前无线局域网的主流标准,IEEE802.11网络提供了种类繁多的服务.然而,由于无线网络的移动性本质,切换技术成为IEEES02.11网络的关键技术.对IEEE802.11无线网络中现有的切换技术进行了研究,分析了可行的改进方向,并实现了一种改进的切换方案.     

基于IEEE802.11e HCCA的接入控制方案

较传统的IEEE802.11标准的MAC协议,802.11e增强了对QoS的支持力度,主要基于IEEE802.11e的HCCA机制,提出了一套控制接入方案,本方案在全面考虑QoS参数的基础上提出了一个有效的调度算法,从而确保了实时性业务的QoS需要.     

An efficient admission control for IEEE 802.11 networks based on throughput analyses of (un)saturated channel

This paper presents a novel analytical model and an efficient admission control (AC) algorithm for IEEE 802.11 distributed coordinated function access mechanism. In contrast to the previous approaches, both saturated and unsaturated states of network are analyzed and the impacts of error‐frame rate and retransmission limit are also taken into account based on an improved Markov chain model. Thus, the network resources can be efficiently utilized. Taking the throughput difference between saturated and unsaturated states as the residual bandwidth, an efficient AC algorithm is designed to utilize the network resources effectively. Extensive simulation data match our analytical results and demonstrate that the AC algorithm is efficient and can make the effective utilization of network resources. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A link-indexed statistical traffic prediction approach to improving IEEE 802.11 PSM

IEEE 802.11 power save mode (PSM) is a representative of energy-saving protocols which put wireless network interfaces into sleep during idleness. To save energy, part of the performance of IEEE 802.11 is sacrificed attributed to the wake-up latency thus introduced. This paper proposes a complementary mechanism, called link-indexed statistical traffic predictor (LISP) to improve IEEE 802.11 PSM. LISP employs a simple, light-weight traffic prediction method to speed up the delivery of packets along the end-to-end path. By seeking the inherent correlation between ATIM_ACKs and incoming traffic, nodes en route stay awake in the beacon intervals in which packets are anticipated to arrive. As the result, a “freeway” is bridged for packets to rapidly traverse the route. Meanwhile, the number of duty cycles is reduced and more energy is conserved. We have conducted analytical and simulation studies and demonstrated the effectiveness of LISP. The impact of various factors is investigated, including traffic load, number of hops (of routes which connections traverse), ATIM window size and packet size, in both tandem networks and networks of arbitrary topologies.     

基于IEEE802．11b无线局域网支持QoS的盲检测算法

这里提出了一种基于IEEE802.11b无线局域网(WLANs)的MAC层的终端盲检测算法.和以往的算法相比,该算法通过对连接接入点AP(Access Point)的所有活动终端进行盲检测,可以非常有效的增加每个AP点所支持的语音通信终端数量,从而增加了信道的带宽,提高语音服务质量QoS.而且算法只执行在接入点的点协调功能上(PCF),因此不需要对当前的IEEE802.11MAC层的协议做任何修改.仿真结果表明了本算法对WLANs语音服务质量的有效支持.     

一种基于IEEE 802.11的多速率自适应MAC协议

提出了一种新颖的基于连续ACK帧统计信息的IEEE 802.11多速率自适应MAC协议EARF(EnhancedARF),其主要思想是:每一个速率有各自的成功阈值——速率升高的门限值,并且该值根据信道状况(用延时因子量化)动态地变化。协议不需对现有的IEEE 802.11标准做任何修改,因此易于通过编写驱动程序实现。仿真表明在大多数信道条件下,该协议性能较现有的基于ACK帧统计的速率自适应协议如ARF,ARF3-10都有较大的提高。     

IEEE802.11切换中一种快速主动扫频算法

提出了一种IEEE802.11切换过程中的快速主动扫频算法。首先STA从扩展了位置信息的邻居AP图中选择被扫频的AP,然后采用单播方式完成扫频。改进算法减轻了由多余信道扫频、等待时延和信道冲突所产生的时延。仿真分析表明,改进算法确保切换完成,并明显地减小了扫频时延。     

Rate adaptive protocol for multirate IEEE 802.11 networks

In this paper, a rate adaptive protocol AMARF (Adaptive Multirate Auto Rate Fallback) for multirate IEEE 802.11 networks is proposed. In AMARF, each data rate is assigned a unique success threshold, which is a criterion to judge when to switch a rate to the next higher one, and the success thresholds can be adjusted dynamically in an adaptive manner according to the running conditions, such as packet length and channel parameters. Moreover, the proposed protocol can be implemented by software without any change to the current IEEE 802.11 standards. Simulation result shows that AMARF yields significantly higher throughput than other existing schemes including ARF and its variants, in various running conditions.     

Admission control with load balancing in IEEE 802.11-based ESS mesh networks

In this paper we study connection admission control (CAC) in IEEE 802.11-based ESS mesh networks. An analytical model is developed for studying the effects of CAC on mesh network capacity. A distributed CAC scheme is proposed, which incorporates load balancing when selecting a mesh path for new connections. Our results show that connection level performance, including both average number of connections and connection blocking probability, can be greatly improved using the proposed mechanism compared to other admission control schemes. Dongmei Zhao received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in June 2002. Since July 2002 she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada where she is an assistant professor. Dr. Zhao’s research interests include modeling and performance analysis, quality-of-service provisioning, access control and admission control in wireless networks. Dr. Zhao is a member of the IEEE. Jun Zou received his B. Eng. and M. Eng. Degrees from Tianjin University, China in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He worked at Siemens Communication Networks Ltd., Beijing from 2002 to 2004. Currently, he is a PhD. student at McMaster University, Canada. His research interests include wireless networking, routing protocols, architecture of next generation networks and network security. Terence D. Todd received the B.A.Sc., M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While at Waterloo Dr. Todd spent 3 years as a Research Associate with the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG). He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. At McMaster he has been the Principal Investigator on a number of projects in the optical networks and wireless networking areas. Professor Todd spent 1991 on research leave in the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He also spent January-December 1998 on research leave at The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England. While at ORL he worked on the piconet project which was an early embedded wireless network testbed. Dr. Todd’s research interests include metropolitan/local area networks, wireless communications and the performance analysis of computer communication networks and systems. Dr. Todd is a past Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and currently holds the NSERC/RIM/CITO Chair on Pico-Cellular Wireless Internet Access Networks Dr. Todd is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario and a member of the IEEE.     

基于带宽估计的ad hoc网络拥塞控制机制

针对ad hoc网络提出了一种基于带宽估计的拥塞控制机制.该机制通过实时的监测无线节点链路的工作状态,来估计节点的可用带宽,从而获得节点的拥塞程度指标,根据包的类型进行拥塞控制.由于带宽估计不需要与其他节点进行状态信息交换,降低了系统开销.同时拥塞控制机制缓解了无线网络的拥塞状态,提高了网络性能.     

Two-level protection and guarantee for multimedia traffic in IEEE 802.11e distributed WLANs

In order to support multimedia applications such as voice and video over the wireless medium, a contention-based channel access function, called Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA), has been developed in the emerging standard IEEE 802.11e. In the EDCA, differentiated channel access is provided for different traffic classes. In this paper, we propose a two-level protection and guarantee mechanism for voice and video traffic in the EDCA-based distributed wireless LANs. In the first-level protection, the existing voice and video flows are protected from the new and other existing voice and video flows via a distributed admission control with tried-and-known and early-protection enhancements. In the second-level protection, the voice and video flows are protected from the best-effort data traffic by adopting frame-based and limit-based data control mechanisms. Performance evaluations are conducted in terms of throughput, delay, transmission limit, number of collisions, and throughput square relative difference. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed two-level protection and guarantee mechanism is very effective in terms of the protection and guarantee of existing voice and video flows as well as the utilization of the channel capacity. An early version of this paper was presented at IEEE INFOCOM 2004.     

A seamless handoff scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

The advance of computer network technologies such as IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network has made it possible for users to connect to Internet almost anywhere. A mobile node (MN) is likely to move between different base stations while running applications. The IETF has defined the Mobile IP (MIP) to allow MNs to maintain their communication uninterrupted while roaming across different IP subnets. However, the mechanisms defined in MIP may cause undesired connection disruptions or packet losses, which will significantly degrade the quality of real‐time applications. It is an important and challenging issue to support seamless handoff management. To achieve seamless handoff, we propose a unified scheme to address application quality degradation. Our main contribution is the concept and implementation of utilising buffering and resending method to eliminate the packet losses while keeping the end‐to‐end delay of real‐time traffic flow in an acceptable value. The NS‐2 simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly maintain application quality during layer‐2 and ‐3 handoffs. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On delay constrained CAC scheme and scheduling policy for CBR traffic in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

CBR (constant bit rate) traffic is expected to be an important traffic source in wireless networks. Such sources usually have stringent jitter or delay requirements and in many cases they should be delivered exactly as they were generated. In this paper, we propose a strictly guaranteed QoS (quality‐of‐service) provisioning CAC (call admission control) scheme with a polling‐based scheduling policy for CBR traffic in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs. Under such a scheme, the proposed transmit‐permission policy for HCCA (HCF controlled channel access) method can forecast the maximum suffered delay for each packet and derive sufficient conditions so that all the CBR sources satisfy their time constraints to provide deterministic QoS guarantees. A simple analytical model is carried out to estimate the average queueing delay of the proposed scheme. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to validate its promising performance. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme maintains a high throughput with respect to the whole range of system load. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Quality of service support in IEEE 802.11 wireless ad hoc networks

Supporting Quality of Service (QoS) in wireless networks is a challenging problem. The IEEE 802.11 LAN standard was developed primarily for elastic data applications. In order to support the transmission of real-time data, a polling-based scheme called the point coordination function (PCF) was introduced in IEEE 802.11. However, PCF was not able to meet the desired and practical service differentiation requirements to fulfill the need of real-time data. Therefore, Task Group E of the IEEE 802.11 working group released several IEEE 802.11e drafts, whose main task is to support QoS in IEEE 802.11 LANs. The polling scheme of PCF is extended in IEEE 802.11e into the more complex hybrid coordination function (HCF). We found that HCF has several performance issues that may affect its anticipated performance. In this paper, we address these issues and propose a QoS enhancement over PCF, called enhanced PCF (EPCF) that enables Wireless LAN to send a combination of voice, data and isochronous data packets using the current IEEE 802.11 PCF. First, we compare the performance of the proposed model (EPCF) with the HCF function of the IEEE 802.11e through simulation. Second, we extend the proposed model (EPCF) to work in a multihop wireless ad hoc mode and present the advantages and limitations in this case. Simulation results demonstrate an enhanced performance of our scheme over the legacy PCF and a comparable performance to the IEEE 802.11e HCF in terms of the average delay and system throughput. However, EPCF is much simpler than HCF, provides flow differentiation, and is easy to implement in the current IEEE 802.11 standard.     

基于业务认知的多用户带宽分配方法

无线局域网的MAC协议难以兼顾多用户差别的业务需求和网络吞吐量的有效性。建立具有超帧结构的带宽分配模型和具有惩罚函数的优化目标,计算满足单用户QoS需求的最小带宽,进而提出基于业务认知的多用户带宽分配算法(TCBAA)。该算法优先满足用户QoS要求,其次最大化系统的吞吐量。理论和仿真实验显示:相比于固定分配机制和最大吞吐量分配机制,TCBAA能够在有限带宽下满足更多用户的QoS需求。     

Rethinking available bandwidth estimation in IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks

This Letter rethinks the problems of available bandwidth estimation in IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks. The estimation accuracy is increased by improving the calculation accuracy of the probability for two adjacent nodes' idle periods to overlap.     

一种基于IEEE 802．11a的PHY—MAC跨层设计

文章基于IEEE802．11a协议,从理论上分析了物理层的编码速率、调制方式,以及MAC层的数据帧长度对吞吐率的影响,提出一种基于PHY和MAC层的跨层算法。仿真结果表明,文章提出的PHY-MAC跨层传输方案能显著提高系统的数据吞吐率。     

Adaptive QoS Management for IEEE 802.11 Future Wireless ISPs

Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) are expected to be the new generation of access providers using the emerging IEEE 802.11 technology. Face to the high competition of providing network services, the WISP have to offer the best service to the users. For this purpose, the WISP networks' managers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) with a minimum cost in their wireless networks. The current link layer IEEE 802.11b provides fair sharing of the radio resource with no service differentiation mechanism; similarly to the Internet best effort service. However, the ongoing standard IEEE 802.11e should implement a priority mechanism at the link layer to differentiate the users' traffic. In order to overcome the lack of differentiated mechanism in the current link layer IEEE 802.11b, hence controlling the utilization of the scarce radio resource, we propose in this article to deploy Diffserv architecture coupled with an adaptive provisioning of QoS to provide better services to the users with minimum WISP cost and improve the utilization of the radio resource. Compliant with the current and future IEEE 802.11 link layer, the proposed adaptive QoS provisioning mechanism reacts to the radio resource fluctuation and improves the number of accepted clients in the IEEE 802.11 wireless cells based on the WISP business policies. The network layer differentiation provided by the Diffserv architecture intends to control the concurrent access of the traffic to the scarce radio resources at the IP layer of the mobile hosts for the uplink traffic on one hand, and at the IP layer of the base stations for the downlink traffic on the other hand.