Cross layer access point selection mechanisms for a distributed queuing MAC protocol

The Distributed Queuing with Collision Avoidance (DQCA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol has been presented in the literature as a high-performance protocol for WLANs. Previous work regarding DQCA is focused on the operation of a single cell, where no interaction with neighboring sites is considered. In this paper, we define specific handoff procedures (channel sensing, discovery and reassociation functions) that enable the roaming of users in a scenario consisting of several DQCA access points (APs) deployed in a specific area using non-overlapping channel frequencies. Furthermore, we introduce a number of AP selection mechanisms in order to provide efficient reassociation decision criteria in the context of DQCA. These mechanisms are based either on a single metric such as the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) or the traffic load, or on cross-layer design by combining the information from different layers. Finally, our proposed solutions are evaluated by means of computer simulations.     

A near-optimum cross-layered distributed queuing protocol for wireless LAN [medium access control protocols for wireless LANs]

Distributed queuing collision avoidance (DQCA) is a distributed MAC protocol for WLAN systems that offers near optimum performance. The protocol implements a reservation scheme that ensures collision-free data transmissions for high traffic load and switches smoothly and automatically to a random access mechanism when the traffic load is light, improving the delay performance for this situation. In this article the DQCA protocol operation is thoroughly described, and its algorithm rules are given. Furthermore, an enhanced cross-layer scheduling mechanism is also proposed for inclusion in the protocol procedure. This mechanism employs a virtual priority function to reschedule transmissions according to a cross-layer design. Two possible configurations are described in this article by including a PHY-MAC dialog involving channel stale information and the waiting time of the packets in the system, offering a trade-off between throughput maximization and fairness. The performance in terms of throughput and mean delay of DQCA and the two cross-layer schemes has been evaluated through simulations, and a significant enhancement over legacy IEEE 802.11 operation is achieved. The obtained results emphasize the advantages of the proposed schemes and the importance of cross-layer design in wireless communication systems.     

DQCA：一种新的城域网介质访问控制协议

本文提出一种新的城域网介质访问控制协议－ＤＱＣＡ。在大文件传输时ＤＱＣＡ网络经过一个暂态过程后可达到公平的稳态。而这个暂态过程比ＤＱＤＢ短得多，而且网络无带宽浪费。ＤＱＣＡ城域网的带宽分配十分灵活。计算机仿真显示了ＤＱＣＡ良好的介质访问特性。     

Cross-Layer Scheduling with QoS Support over a Distributed Queuing MAC for Wireless LANs

Distributed Queuing Collision Avoidance (DQCA) is an efficient MAC protocol designed for infrastructure Wireless LANs. In this paper, four algorithms are proposed that alter the FIFO scheduling order of DQCA in order to meet specific network requirements. The proposed schemes combine the efficiency of opportunistic scheduling with the QoS provisioning through service differentiation. The opportunistic policy encourages transmissions at higher rates when the channel condition is good and is implemented through a cross-layer dialogue between the PHY and the MAC layers. The key idea of service differentiation is to assign priorities to traffic flows with different requirements in order to provide QoS guarantees. The throughput, delay and jitter performance of the proposed schemes has been evaluated through simulations for a scenario with heterogeneous traffic of voice, video, best-effort and background data traffic flows.     

An adaptive reservation scheme for VBR voice traffic in wireless ATM networks

A reservation scheme, named dynamic hybrid partitioning, is proposed for the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol of wireless ATM (WATM) networks operating in Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode. The goal is to improve the performance of the real-time Variable Bit Rate (VBR) voice traffic in networks with mixed voice/data traffic. In most proposed MAC protocols for WATM networks, the reservation phase treats all traffic equally, whether delay-sensitive or not. Hence, delay-sensitive VBR traffic sources have to compete for reservation each time they wake up from idle mode. This causes large and variable channel access delays, and increases the delay and delay variation (jitter) experienced by ATM cells of VBR traffic. In the proposed scheme, the reservation phase of the MAC protocol is dynamically divided into a contention-free partition for delay-sensitive idle VBR traffic, and a contention partition for other traffic. Adaptive algorithms dynamically adjust the partition sizes to minimize the channel bandwidth overhead. Simulation results show that the delay performance of delay-sensitive VBR traffic is improved while minimizing the overhead.     

一种基于IEEE802.11支持QoS自适应调度器模型和算法

这篇文章提出了能够有效支持QoS的IEEE802．11自适应调度器模型。和以往的支持QoS的调度器模型相比，这里根据在主控接入点(MAP：Master Access Point)和用户终端(UT：User Termination)的各自延时需求对满足不同的传输机制的分组流进行自适应调度。这种机制不仅完全兼容当前支持QoS的IEEE802．11MAC协议标准，而且能够有效减少由于实时传输带来的分组延时，增加满足不同信道负载和带宽要求的数据流的吞吐率。实时测试得到的数据基本验证了这个要求。     

DQCA城域网实现计算机局域网互连时的性能研究

本文分析了分布式排队周期性访问ＤＱＣＡ城域网实现计算机局域网互连时的性能。通过比较研究发现，ＤＱＣＡ城域网在实现局域网互连时的性能（包括公平性能和报文停留时间）优于ＤＱＤＢ城域网。研究了网络参数Ｐｍａｘ、报文平均长度和报文统计特性对网络性能的影响。     

Extended Performance Evaluation of PRADOS: A Scheduling Algorithm for Traffic Integration in a Wireless ATM Network

The MAC protocol, known as MASCARA (Mobile Access Scheme based on Contention And Reservation for ATM), is an infrastructure-based, adaptive TDMA scheme, which combines reservation- and contention-based access methods to provide multiple access efficiency and Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees to wireless ATM terminal connections that share a common radio channel. Radio channel sharing is performed by the PRADOS (Prioritized Regulated Allocation Delay Oriented Scheduling) algorithm. In this paper we assess the capability of PRADOS to guarantee to voice and data traffic types the QoS they need. The analysis leads to the conclusion that PRADOS cannot avoid the interference between the various types of traffic. A criterion to alleviate this drawback is also outlined at the end of the paper.     

Integrating high quality video streams with FTP traffic over a noisy high capacity wireless cellular channel

In this paper we propose and evaluate a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for the efficient integration of high quality video traffic with ftp data packet traffic over a wireless cellular channel of very high capacity. We envision a system where the mobile terminals are considered to be high performance devices with extended storage capabilities which can act like cache memories streaming multimedia material. Via an extensive simulation study we evaluate the system’s performance under a variety of possible loads which consist of actual MPEG-4 streams and ftp sessions, and we show that our scheme outperforms another, well-known MAC protocol for cellular networks.     

Modeling and performance analysis of an alternative to IEEE 802.11e Hybrid Control Function

Modern wireless networks are offering a wide range of applications that require the efficient integration of multimedia and traditional data traffic along with QoS provision. The IEEE 802.11e workgroup has standardized a new QoS enhanced access scheme for wireless LANs, namely Hybrid Control Function (HCF). HCF consists of the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and the Hybrid Control Channel Access (HCCA) protocols which manage to ensure QoS support. However, they exhibit specific weaknesses that limit network performance. This work analyzes an alternative protocol, called Priority Oriented Adaptive Polling (POAP). POAP is an integrated channel access mechanism, is collision free, it employs priorities to differentiate traffic in a proportional way, it provides fairness, and generally supports QoS for all types of multimedia applications, while efficiently serving background data traffic. POAP is compared to HCF in order to examine the wireless network performance when serving integrated traffic.     

Design and performance evaluation of a MAC protocol for wireless local area networks

We propose and analyze, from a performance viewpoint, a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The protocol, named Prioritized-Access with Centralized-Control (PACC), supports integrated traffics by guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network resources. The proposed protocol combines random access for signalling, with collision-free access to the transmission channel. The transmission channel is assumed to be slotted, with slots grouped into frames. Access to transmission slots is controlled by a centralized scheduler which manages a multiclass queue containing the users' requests to access the transmission channel. Three classes of users are assumed: voice traffic (voice), data traffic with real-time constraints (high-priority data), and classical data traffic (low-priority data). A priority mechanism ensures that speech users have the highest priority in accessing the idle slots, since speech packets have a more demanding delay constraint. The remaining channel bandwidth is shared fairly among the high-priority data terminals. The low-priority data terminals use the slots left empty by the other classes. Specifically, access to transmission slots is controlled by the centralized scheduler by managing a transmission cycle for each class of terminals. The voice-terminals cycle has a constant length equal to one frame, while the lengths of the data-terminals cycles are random variables which depend on the number of active voice and data terminals. In this paper we show that the proposed scheme can support the same maximum number of voice terminals as an ideal scheduler, while guaranteeing an almost complete utilization of network capacity. In addition, via a performance analysis, we verify that by limiting the number of real-time data terminals in the network this class of traffic can be statistically guaranteed access delays in the order of 200–300 msec. Hence, the QoS the network gives to the real-time data terminals makes this service suitable for real-time applications such as alarms or low bit rate video. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

AP-Initiated Reservations for Performance Enhancement in 802.11 MAC

In the infrastructure mode of the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), usually an Access Point (AP) requires more transmission opportunities than mobile stations, since the AP relays all the data traffic among mobile stations. However, the current MAC protocol gives AP the same opportunity with mobile stations for channel accessing, and it may introduce unfairness in the infrastructure mode of WLANs. In this paper, aiming at resolving the unfairness problem and enhancing the network performance, we propose an AP-initiated reservation scheme. Our scheme gives a high priority for AP’s channel accessing and allows AP to transmit multiple frames at once. We develop an analytical model to study the performance of proposed scheme, and also perform extensive simulations. Both the analytical and simulation results show that proposed scheme significantly enhances the performance of 802.11 MAC.     

A Cross-Layer Channel Access and Routing Protocol for Medical-Grade QoS Support in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of principal design issues of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for medical information systems is to classify received packets based on their priorities and guarantees so that they can be transmitted reliably, thus satisfying QoS requirements. In addition, when the target WSN requires multi-hop communications and the traffic load increases significantly, it is challenging to support both load balancing and suitable QoS at the same time. In this paper, we propose a new reliable protocol termed Cross-layer Channel Access and Routing (CCAR), which simultaneously supports both MAC and routing operations for medical-grade QoS provisions. CCAR initially determines the routing path with the lowest traffic load and low latency using newly defined channel quality factors. Concurrently, the source node allocates the predefined QoS Access Category to each packet and reserves the channel along the route. In addition, CCAR introduces an effective route maintenance scheme to avoid link failures in bottlenecked intermediate nodes, which prevents unnecessary packet drops and route rediscovery evocations. Finally, through both simulation studies and real test-bed experiments, we evaluate the performance of CCAR by comparing it with other conventional protocols, demonstrating that the proposed protocol can more efficiently support medical-grade QoS packets, especially when the network is heavily loaded.     

A distributed laxity-based priority scheduling scheme for time-sensitive traffic in mobile ad hoc networks

Characteristics of Mobile Ad hoc Networks such as shared broadcast channel, bandwidth and battery power limitations, highly dynamic topology, and location dependent errors, make provisioning of quality of service (QoS) in such networks very difficult. The Medium Access Control (MAC) layer plays a very important role as far as QoS is concerned. The MAC layer is responsible for selecting the next packet to be transmitted and the timing of its transmission. We have proposed a new MAC layer protocol that includes a laxity-based priority scheduling scheme and an associated back-off scheme, for supporting time-sensitive traffic. In the proposed scheduling scheme, we select the next packet to be transmitted, based on its priority value which takes into consideration the uniform laxity budget of the packet, the current packet delivery ratio of the flow to which the packet belongs, and the packet delivery ratio desired by the user. The back-off mechanism devised by us grants a node access to the channel, based on the rank of its highest priority packet in comparison to other such packets queued at nodes in the neighborhood of the current node. We have studied the performance of our protocol that combines a packet scheduling scheme and a channel access scheme through simulation experiments, and the simulation results show that our protocol exhibits a significant improvement in packet delivery ratio under bounded end-to-end delay requirements, compared to the existing 802.11 DCF and the Distributed Priority Scheduling scheme proposed recently in [ACM Wireless Networks Journal 8 (5) (2002) 455–466; Proceedings of ACM MOBICOM '01, July 2001, pp. 200–209].     

移动分布式无线网络中具有QoS保证的UPMA协议

该文基于有效竞争预约接入、无冲突轮询传输的思想提出了支持节点移动性、多跳网络结构和服务质量(QoS)的依据用户妥善安排的多址接入(UPMA)协议。它大大提高了信道的使用效率,保证了发送节点能快速接入信道,同时,最大程度地保证所有实时业务的时延和带宽要求。最后,我们考察了它对Internet数据业务的支持性能。     

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.     

A Collision Alleviation Scheme for IEEE 802.11p VANETs

IEEE 802.11p protocol, also known as Wireless Access for the Vehicular Environment provides dedicated short range communication for future Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). According to the IEEE 802.11p standard, the highest priority traffic transmission often suffers from the consecutive collisions in bursty arrival or congested scenarios because of the naive pre-assumption of a low level of congestion in the system, and thus results in emergent messages delayed. In this paper, we propose a simple, but yet well performing collision alleviation scheme to alleviate intensive collisions between highest priority access categories which usually used to schedule emergency message since safety is the most critical and promising issue in VANET. In addition to theoretical analysis, simulations are conducted to evaluate its performance. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can not only increase the achievable channel throughput of the legacy protocol at most 15%, but also reduce the average packet access delay of the legacy protocol at least 5% and the packet collision probability at most 60% in congested VANET environments.     

基于混沌预测的宽带DVB-RCS卫星接入信道动态分配方案研究

该文概述了基于卫星数字视频广播-反向信道系统(DVB-RCS)标准的宽带卫星通信网的特点,并重点研究了多址接入信道的动态分配策略,在利用混沌理论对网络中的自相似业务流量进行预测的基础上,提出了一种新型混合按需分配多址接入方案。该文还利用OPNET软件建立了仿真系统,用于比较不同方案的性能。仿真结果表明,在高信道负载以及网络中业务流具有较高自相似程度的条件下,该文所提出方案具有更优越的性能。     

Dynamic Reservation Multiple Access (DRMA): A new multiple access scheme for Personal Communication System (PCS)

To improve the spectrum efficiency of integrated voice and data services in Personal Communication System (PCS), several reservation-type multiple access schemes, such as Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA), Dynamic Time Division Multiple Access (D-TDMA), Resource Auction Multiple Access (RAMA), etc., have been proposed. PRMA uses the data packet itself to make a channel reservation, and is inefficient in that each unsuccessful reservation wastes one slot. However, it does not have a fixed reservation overhead and offers shorter access delay. On the other hand, fixed reservation overhead is unavoidable in both RAMA and D-TDMA. Compared to D-TDMA and PRMA, RAMA is superior in the sense that its slot assignment is independent of the traffic load. But its implementation is difficult. With these observations, a new reservation protocol, called Dynamic Reservation Multiple Access (DRMA), is proposed in this paper. With this new protocol, the success probability of channel access is greatly improved at the expense of slightly increased system complexity. It solves the problem of inefficiency in PRMA, but without introducing the fixed reservation overhead as in D-TDMA and RAMA. In addition, it is more suited to the dynamic behavior of the integrated traffic because there is no fixed boundary between voice and data slots (which is mandatory in D-TDMA and RAMA). Our numerical results indicate that its performance is superior to the existing reservation protocols, especially in the integrated traffic scenario. Moreover, the soft capacity feature is exhibited when the traffic load increases.     

依据用户妥善安排的多址接入协议在分布式无线网络中的性能研究

本文基于有效竞争预约接入、无冲突轮询传输的思想提出了在多跳分布式无线网络中支持节点移动性和多跳网络结构的依据用户妥善安排的多址接入(UPMA)协议.该协议能够保证发送节点快速接入信道,从而大大提高信道的使用效率.用仿真方法研究了多跳分布式无线网络中采用该协议时的网络性能.结果表明,UPMA协议可以提供较高的通过量、较低的平均分组时延和较小的平均分组丢失率.