On Multiple Traffic Type Integration over Wireless TDMA Channels with Adjustable Request Bandwidth

A new medium access control (MAC) protocol for mobile wireless communications is presented and investigated. We explore, via an extensive simulation study, the performance of the protocol when integrating voice, video and data packet traffic over a wireless channel of high capacity (referring to an indoor microcellular environment). Depending on the number of video users admitted into the system, our protocol varies: a) the request bandwidth dedicated to resolving the voice users contention, and b) the probability with which the base station grants information slots to voice users, in order to preserve full priority for video traffic. We evaluate the maximum voice capacity and mean access delay, as well as the aggregate channel throughput, for various voice and video load conditions, and the maximum voice capacity, aggregate channel throughput and average data message delays, for various video, voice and data load conditions. As proven by the comparison with a recently introduced efficient MAC scheme (DPRMA), when integrating voice and video traffic our scheme obtains higher voice capacity and aggregate channel throughput. When integrating all three traffic types, our scheme achieves high aggregate channel throughput in all cases of traffic load.     

Integrating Voice, Video, and E-mail Data Packet Traffic over Wireless TDMA Channels with Errors

In this paper, we explore, via an extensive simulation study, the performance of a new medium access-control (MAC) protocol when integrating voice, video, and e-mail data packet traffic over a wireless channel of high capacity, with errors. Depending on the number of video users admitted into the system, our protocol varies (a) the request bandwidth dedicated to resolving the voice users contention and (b) the probability with which the base station grants information slots to voice users, in order to preserve full priority for video traffic. We evaluate the voice and video packet-dropping probabilities for various voice and video load conditions and the average e-mail data message delays. Our scheme achieves high aggregate channel throughput in all cases of traffic load despite the introduction of errors in the system.     

Cross-layer designs of multichannel reservation MAC under Rayleigh fading

We consider a reservation-based medium access control (MAC) scheme where users reserve data channels through a slotted-ALOHA procedure. The base station grants access to users in a Rayleigh fading environment using measurements at the physical layer and system information at the MAC layer. The paper has two contributions pertaining to simple reservation based medium access. First, we provide a Markov chain formulation to analyze the performance (throughput/channel utilization) of the multichannel slotted system. Second, a Neyman-Pearson like MAC design optimized for performance is presented. This design can serve as a benchmark in evaluating the performance of other designs based on conventional physical layer detectors such as maximum a posteriori probability, maximum likelihood, and uniformly most powerful detectors. Results show that utilizing system information in addition to the physical layer measurements indeed leads to a gain in performance. We discuss the issue of further improving the performance in fading by means of multiple measurements and also comment on the delay/channel-utilization trade-off for the optimal MAC design.     

A packet reservation multiple access (PRMA)-based algorithm for multimedia wireless system

The major issue in the wireless multimedia system design is the selection of a suitable channel sharing media access control (MAC) protocol. The design challenge is to identify a wireless "multimedia capable" MAC protocol that provides a sufficient degree of transparency for many different kinds of services. This protocol should guarantee different quality of service (QoS) parameters for different types of traffic while in the same time achieving high throughput. In this paper a MAC protocol to serve different kinds of traffic, namely voice, data, and, real time variable bit rate (rt-VBR) video is proposed. The transmission time scale is divided into frames. Each frame is subdivided into N time slots. In this protocol, a fixed number of slots M out of 150 time slots are reserved at the beginning of every frame to transmit some of the video packets arriving during the frame interval. The rest of the video packets contend with the voice and data packets for the remaining time slots of this frame as in normal packet reservation multiple access (PRMA). One objective of this paper is to find the optimum value of M allowing the maximum number of voice and data users to share the RF channel with one video user. Another objective is to find the optimum permission probabilities of sending contending voice, data, and video packets allowing the maximum number of users sharing the RF channel. The dropping probability requirement for video is examined.     

An unslotted multichannel channel‐access protocol for distributed direct‐sequence networks

A multichannel reservation-based channel-access protocol is investigated in this paper. The available system bandwidth is divided into distinct frequency channels. Under the protocol, one channel (the control channel) is used to exchange reservation messages and the remaining channels (the traffic channels) are used for information-bearing traffic. The performance of this scheme is compared to that of a single-channel reservation-based protocol. A simple contention-based slotted-Aloha protocol is also considered. Performance results take into account the effects of multiple-access interference on acquisition and packet errors. Results show that the reservation-based approach is advantageous under conditions of high traffic. In addition, a pacing mechanism that mitigates multiple-access interference and promotes fairness is described, and results are presented that demonstrate its effectiveness. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Wireless access to the World Wide Web in an integrated CDMA system

We propose a wireless access mechanism for web traffic packets in an integrated wireless code-division multiple-access system that has both voice and Web traffic. The proposed scheme is a medium-access control layer/link layer (MAC/LL) scheduling algorithm that consists of a two level control: admission control and packet scheduling. The admission control restricts the number of users in the system such that quality-of-service requirements [target signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) and delay] for both voice and Web traffic can be met. The packet scheduling balances the system interference on a slot-by-slot basis such that the target SIRs can be achieved for all users (voice and Web browsing sessions) with a higher scheduling priority for voice. Designing admission control for Web users based on the average offered rate per session is difficult due to the high variations in the offered load generated by heavy tailed distributions for Web traffic. To overcome this problem, we propose an admission control algorithm that adaptively estimates the aggregate average load based on load measurements using a sliding observation window.     

SEAMA: a source encoding assisted multiple access protocol forwireless communications

This paper presents SEAMA, a source encoding assisted multiple access (MAC) protocol, to integrate voice and data traffic in a wireless network. SEAMA exploits the time variations of the speech coding rate, through statistical multiplexing, to efficiently use the available bandwidth and to increase the link utilization. In each frame, SEAMA allocates bandwidth among calls as needed. Ongoing calls are always assigned some minimum bandwidth to allow for coding of the background noise during silence periods. An embedded voice encoding scheme is employed to allow the network to control the rate of the calls during congestion by selectively dropping some of the less significant packets, thus causing a graceful degradation of quality. It is shown that by employing an appropriate voice coding scheme and exploiting the characteristics of the source encoder in the MAC protocol, SEAMA almost doubles the capacity of the voice section compared to a circuit-switched network, while practically maintaining the quality of voice traffic     

Designing a mobile broadband wireless access network

In this paper, a new OFDM-based air interface technology for a mobile broadband wireless system is described. The technology leverages the standard Internet protocol (IP) network elements to build the system and deploys a new air interface technology based on OFDMA. Cross-layer optimization played a major role in the design where the choices made in the physical, MAC, and link layers are also driven by the goal of extending the Internet to the wireless space. A major physical layer benefit of this air interface comes from the orthogonality property that the results in the elimination of in-cell interference are averaged and a worst-case interferer does not limit the system performance. The physical layer features not only result in high capacity but also provide very fine granularity of allocating air link resources, which improves the MAC and link-layer efficiency. The MAC and link layer provide contention-free, fast control channels between the RAR and the WTs. These channels are used to ferry a variety of signaling such as assignments of traffic channel, acknowledgements, channel quality, and traffic request reports. This holistic approach allows for a scheduler that could not only achieve high spectral efficiency but also allow for a fine control over QoS attributes such as latency, reliability, and service differentiation.     

IEEE 802.11 medium access control enhancements based on simultaneous multiple‐input multiple‐output bandwidth sharing

The demand for higher data rate has spurred the adoption of multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) transmission techniques in IEEE 802.11 products. MIMO techniques provide an additional spatial dimension that can significantly increase the channel capacity. A number of multiuser MIMO system have been proposed, where the multiple antenna at the physical layer are employed for multiuser access, allowing multiple users to share the same bandwidth. As these MIMO physical layer technologies further evolve, the usable bandwidth per application increases; hence, the average service time per application decreases. However, in the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function‐based systems, a considerable amount of bandwidth is wasted during the medium access and coordination process. Therefore, as the usable bandwidth is enhanced using MIMO technology, the bandwidth wastage of medium access and coordination becomes a significant performance bottleneck. Hence, there is a fundamental need for bandwidth sharing schemes at the medium access control (MAC) layer where multiple connections can concurrently use the increased bandwidth provided by the physical layer MIMO technologies. In this paper, we propose the MIMO‐aware rate splitting (MRS) MAC protocol and examine its behavior under different scenarios. MRS is a distributed MAC protocol where nodes locally cooperate with one another to share bandwidth via splitting the spatial channels of MIMO systems. Simulation results of MRS protocol are obtained and compared with those of IEEE 802.11n protocol. We show that our proposed MRS scheme can significantly outperform the IEEE 802.11n in medium access delay and throughput. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rate management in multiuser detection based MAC design for ad hoc networks

We propose a framework that produces synergy between Medium Access Control (MAC) and physical layers in order to increase the users’ individual throughput in a high-capacity CDMA ad hoc network. The MAC layer supports a multiuser detection based access protocol. Users send data packets at different rates, depending on the fading channel state. The framework is based on an LMS (Least Mean Square) prediction algorithm that estimates channel gain at the physical layer. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by simulations. Multiuser detection typically triples the throughput of ad hoc networks but our prediction-based scheme further doubles this metric. The main advantage of the proposed scheme is its flexibility and efficiency in a wide range of data rates and target bit error rates. It is also well fitted to support high-quality multi-media transmissions, and to improve the performance of applications that require high quality of service (QoS).     

A quantitative comparison of multiple access control protocols forwireless ATM

The multiple access control (MAC) problem in a wireless network has intrigued researchers for years. For a broad-band wireless network such as wireless ATM, an effective MAC protocol is very much desired because efficient allocation of channel bandwidth is imperative in accommodating a large user population with satisfactory quality of service. Indeed, MAC protocols for a wireless ATM network in which user traffic requirements are highly heterogeneous (classified into CBR, VBR, and ABR), are even more intricate to design. Considerable research efforts expended in tackling the problem have resulted in a myriad of MAC protocols. While each protocol is individually shown to be effective by the respective designers, it is unclear how time different protocols compare against each other on a unified basis. In this paper, we quantitatively compare seven previously proposed TDMA-based MAC protocols for integrated wireless data and voice services. We first propose a taxonomy of TDMA-based protocols, from which we carefully select seven protocols, namely SCAMA, DTDMA/VR, DTDMA/PR, DQRUMA, DPRMMA, DSA++, and PRMA/DA, such that they are devised based on rather orthogonal design philosophies. The objective of our comparison is to highlight the merits and demerits of different protocol designs     

On Channel Adaptive Multiple Access Control without Contention Queue for Wireless Multimedia Services

As tetherless multimedia computing environments are becoming much desired, broadband wireless communication infrastructures for providing wireless multimedia services will play an important role, and thus, are expected to proliferate. However, despite much research efforts have been expended, the multiple access control of the precious bandwidth remains a challenging problem because of the existence of two common drawbacks in the state-of-the-art protocols: (1) channel condition is ignored or not exploited, and (2) inflexible or biased time slots allocation algorithms are used. Indeed, existing protocols mostly ignore the burst errors due to fading and shadowing, which are inevitable in a mobile and wireless communication environment. A few protocols take into account the burst errors but just handle the errors in a passive manner. Most of the existing protocols employ an inflexible or biased allocation algorithm such that over-provisioning may occur for a certain class of users at the expense of the poor service quality received by other users. In this paper, a new MAC protocol, called SCAMA (synergistic channel adaptive multiple access) is proposed. The proposed protocol works closely with the underlying physical layer in that through observing the channel state information (CSI) of each mobile user, the MAC protocol first segregates a set of users with good CSI from requests gathered in the request contention phase of an uplink frame. The MAC protocol then judiciously allocates information time slots to the users according to the respective traffic types, CSI, urgency, and throughput, which are collectively represented by a novel and flexible priority function. Despite that contention request queue is not used in the protocol, the SCAMA protocol is robust in that it can avoid the congestion collapse which occur in other protocols.     

A Cross-Layered Network-Adaptive Video Streaming Using Sender-Driven Wireless Channel Monitoring

In this letter, we propose a cross-layered network- adaptive video streaming system employing sender-driven wireless channel monitoring over a wireless LAN (WLAN). An intelligent sender with an embedded wireless access point (AP) estimates time-varying available bandwidth based on the observed transmission statistics of medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers. The estimated available bandwidth is then utilized to dynamically guide the network-adaptive control of temporally-scalable video flows.     

Performance evaluation of a modified PRMA protocol for joint voiceand data packet wireless networks

In this paper, a modified version of the packet reservation multiple-access (PRMA) protocol is proposed to provide spatially dispersed voice and data user terminals wireless access to a base station over a common short-range radio channel. An analytical approach is presented in order to derive system performance in terms of mean data message delay and voice packet dropping probability. A suitable permission probability design is also proposed to enhance system performance. Performance comparisons with an extension of the PRMA protocol to voice data systems previously reported in literature are shown to highlight the better behavior of this approach     

Resource management for video streaming in ad hoc networks

Video streaming over wireless links is a challenging issue due to the stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of video traffic, the limited wireless channel bandwidth and the broadcast nature of wireless medium. As contention-based or reservation-based (i.e., contention-free) medium access control (MAC) protocols in existing wireless link-layer standards cannot efficiently support multimedia applications such as video streaming, a hybrid approach has been proposed, which uses both contention and reservation-based channel access mechanisms to transmit packets for each video source. Using this content-aware resource management approach, each video source reserves well below its peak data rate, and uses contention-based media access to transmit the remainder of the packets. In this paper, we first propose two conflict avoidance strategies and two buffering architectures for video streaming over ad hoc networks. Considering the interactions of reservation and contention, we develop the analytical model for the saturated traffic case and then extend it to derive tight performance bounds for the unsaturated case. Using the MAC protocols specified in the WiMedia ECMA-368 standard as an example, extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the analysis. Real video traces have been used to examine the video streaming performance. The analytical and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the hybrid resource management approach, and also reveal the impact of the conflict avoidance strategy and buffering design on the video performance.     

Performance evaluation of the R-BTMA protocol in a distributedmobile radio network context

A reservation multiple-access protocol for mobile communication in a decentralized environment is proposed and investigated both analytically and by simulation. The reservation-busy-tone multiple access (R-BTMA) is a fully distributed and reservation-based protocol. It is a medium access control (MAC) protocol designed for short-range communications between vehicles in a decentralized context (i.e., without a base station). The specificity of this protocol relies on the utilization of two different characteristic channels. Information is transmitted on the data channel (DC), whereas the busy-tone channel (BTC) is used for signalling traffic. The range of the BTC is typically longer than the DC one. The throughput and access delay performance are studied in the particular context of two cells sharing a common BTC. The traffic between the vehicles is supposed to be regular and is parameter sharing. The comparison of the model analysis results to those obtained by the simulative approach shows a satisfactory matching     

A hybrid reservation-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, such as long propagation delay and low available bandwidth, media access control (MAC) protocol designed for the underwater acoustic sensor network (UWASN) is quite different from that for the terrestrial wireless sensor network. However, for the contention-based MAC protocols, the packet transmission time is long because of the long preamble in real acoustic modems, which increase the packet collisions. And the competition phase lasts for long time when many nodes are competing for the channel to access. For the schedule-based MAC protocols, the delay is too long, especially in a UWASN with low traffic load. In order to resolve these problems, a hybrid reservation-based MAC (HRMAC) protocol is proposed for UWASNs in this paper. In the proposed HRMAC protocol, the nodes reserve the channel by declaring and spectrum spreading technology is used to reduce the collision of the control packets. Many nodes with data packets to be transmitted can reserve the channel simultaneously, and nodes with reserved channel transmit their data in a given order. The performance analysis shows that the proposed HRMAC protocol can improve the channel efficiency greatly. Simulation results also show that the proposed HRMAC protocol achieves better performance, namely higher network throughput, lower packet drop ratio, smaller end-to-end delay, less overhead of control packets and lower energy overhead, compared to existing typical MAC protocols for the UWASNs.     

ATM-based TH-SSMA network for multimedia PCS

Personal communications services (PCS) promise to provide a variety of information exchanges among users with any type of mobility, at any time, in any place, through any available device. To achieve this ambitious goal, two of the major challenges in the system design are: (i) to provide a high-speed wireless subsystem with large capacity and acceptable quality-of-service (QoS) and (ii) to design a network architecture capable of supporting multimedia traffic and various kinds of user mobility. A time-hopping spread-spectrum wireless communication system called ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) radio is used to provide communications that are low power, high data rate, fade resistant, and relatively shadow free in a dense multipath environment. Receiver-signal processing of UWB radio is described, and performance of such communications systems, in terms of multiple-access capability, is estimated under ideal multiple-access channel conditions. A UWB-signal propagation experiment is performed using the bandwidth in excess of 1 GHz in a typical modern office building in order to characterize the UWB-signal propagation channel. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the UWB radio and its robustness in a dense multipath environment. A ATM network is used as the backbone network due to its high bandwidth, fast switching capability, flexibility, and well-developed infrastructure. To minimize the impact caused by user mobility on the system performance, a hierarchical network-control architecture is postulated. A wireless virtual circuit (WVC) concept is proposed to improve the transmission efficiency and simplify the network control in the wireless subsystem. The key advantage of this network architecture and WVC concept is that the handoff can be done locally most of the time, due to the localized behavior of PCS users     

Capacity of a wireless LAN with voice and data services

The capacity of a carrier sense multiple-access wireless LAN with voice and data services using the TCP/IP protocol is analyzed to obtain a lower bound for the capacity of the wireless networks with voice and data services. The voice traffic is given a higher priority over the data traffic to accommodate the delay requirement for an acceptable quality of service. This is implemented by assigning the TCP protocol for data and the UDP protocol for voice. The relationship between the data throughput and the number of the voice users supported in this environment is analyzed by using a nonpreemptive queuing model. While the analysis in this paper can be applied to any voice encoding system, the improved multiband excitation voice encoding technique is adopted to provide a low transmission rate with an acceptable quality