Proportional Service Differentiation in Wireless LANs Using Spacing-based Channel Occupancy Regulation

In this paper, we propose Spacing-based Channel Occupancy Regulation (SCORE) MAC protocol for wireless LANs that provides proportional service differentiation in terms of normalized throughput. As shown by our system model and simulation study, SCORE provides consistent, scalable and adjustable proportional differentiation for any network size, any service class distribution, any node data rate and any packet size. Compared to state-of-the-art prioritized service differentiation schemes like Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function (EDCF), SCORE can quantitatively control the channel sharing between different service classes. Moreover, SCORE obtains significant performance improvements in terms of higher network throughput, higher transmission efficiency, lower medium access delay and lower delay jitter. Dr. Qi Xue is now a senior systems engineer with Qualcomm Inc. since Feb. 2005. Qi Xue is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his M.S. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2000. His research interests include protocol design and performance analysis in wireless networks. Weibo Gong received his Ph.D degree from Harvard University in 1987, and have been with the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst since then. He is also an adjunct professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at the same campus. His major research interests include control and systems methods in communication networks, network security, and network modeling and analysis. He is a receipient of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control’s George Axelby Outstanding paper award, an IEEE Fellow, and the Program Committee Chair for the 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Aura Ganz received her B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the Technion in Israel. She is currently an associate professor and Director of the Multimedia Networks Laboratory at the ECE Department, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has experience in topics related to all strata of networking technology, from work related to topics in the network infrastructure development to advanced user-space application development for mobile clients. The research results are validated by a combination of analytical, simulation and prototyping tools. She has published a book “Multimedia Wireless Networks: Technologies, Standards and QoS” (Prentice Hall) and authored over one hundred and fifty peer reviewed publications. Dr. Ganz is a senior member of IEEE     

A Centralized MAC Protocol for QoS Support in UWB-Based Wireless Networks

In this paper we introduce a novel MAC protocol that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia traffic in UWB-based wireless local area networks. The proposed protocol allocates transmission opportunities to QoS and best effort traffic using a set of scheduling and resource control algorithms. The algorithms account for the UWB characteristics such as the co-existence of multiple simultaneous transmissions as well as the possibility of dynamically assigning the nodes' transmission rate and power. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can provide QoS support while optimizing resource utilization. Yuechun Chu received her B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Shanghai University, China, in 1996 and M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from University of Science and Technology of China in 1999. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include MAC protocol design for UWB-based networks, wireless multimedia applications, and architectures and protocols for wireless networks with QoS guarantees. Aura Ganz is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the Multimedia Networks Laboratory at the ECE Department, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has experience in topics related to multimedia wireless networks, optical networks and ubiquitous computing. The research results are validated by a combination of analytical, simulation and prototyping tools. She has published a book “Multimedia Wireless Networks: Technologies, Standards and QoS” (Prentice Hall) and authored over one hundred and fifty peer reviewed publications. Dr. Ganz received her BSc, MSc and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the Technion in Israel.     

Energy Efficient Broadcast in Wireless Ad hoc Networks with Hitch-hiking

In this paper, we propose a novel concept called Hitch-hiking in order to reduce the energy consumption of broadcast application for wireless networks. Hitch-hiking takes advantage of the physical layer design that facilitates the combining of partial signals to obtain the complete information. The concept of combining partial signals using maximal ratio combiner [15] has been used to improve the reliability of the communication link but has never been exploited to reduce energy consumption in broadcasting over wireless ad hoc networks. We study the advantage of Hitch-hiking for the scenario when the transmission power level of nodes is fixed as well as the scenario when the nodes can adjust their power level. For both scenarios, we show that Hitch-hiking is advantageous and have proposed algorithms to construct broadcast tree with Hitch-hiking taken into consideration. For fixed transmission power case, we propose and analyze a centralized heuristic algorithm called SPWMH (Single Power Wireless Multicast with Hitch-hiking) to construct a broadcast tree with minimum forwarding nodes. For the latter case, we propose a centralized heuristic algorithm called Wireless Multicast with Hitch-hiking (WMH) to construct an energy efficient tree using Hitch-hiking and also present a distributed version of the heuristic. We also evaluate the proposed heuristics through simulation. Simulation results show that Hitch-hiking can reduce the transmission cost of broadcast by as much as 50%. Further, we propose and evaluate a protocol called Power Saving with Broadcast Tree (PSBT) that reduces energy consumption of broadcast by eliminating redundancy in receive operation. Finally, we propose an algorithm that takes advantage of both Hitch-hiking and PSBT in conserving energy. Manish Agarwal is an engineer at Microsoft, Redmond. He received his Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2004. He received his undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His research interest lies in the field of mobile ad hoc networks. Lixin Gao is an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Masschusetts, Amherst. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Massachusettes at Amherst in 1996. Her research interests include multimedia networking and Internet routing. Between May 1999 and January 2000, she was a visiting researcher at AT&T Research Labs and DIMACS. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and received an NSF CAREER Award in 1999. She is a member of IEEE, ACM, and Sigma Xi. Joon Ho Cho received the B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1995 and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. From 2001 to 2004, he was with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as an Assistant Professor. Since July 2004, he has been with Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea, where he is presently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. His research interests include wideband systems, multiuser communications, adaptive signal processing, packet radio networks, and information theory. Dr. Cho is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. Jie Wu is a Professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University. He has published over 300 papers in various journal and conference proceedings. His research interests are in the area of mobile computing, routing protocols, fault-tolerant computing, and interconnection networks. Dr. Wu served as a program vice chair for 2000 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) and a program vice chair for 2001 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS). He is a program co-chair for the IEEE 1st International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS'04). He was a co-guest-editor of a special issue in IEEE Computer on “Ad Hoc Networks”. He also editored several special issues in Journal of Parallel and Distributing Computing (JPDC) and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). He is the author of the text “Distributed System Design” published by the CRC press. Currently, Dr. Wu serves as an Associate Editor in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and three other international journals. Dr. Wu is a recipient of the 1996–97 and 2001–2002 Researcher of the Year Award at Florida Atlantic University. He served as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor. Dr. Wu is a Member of ACM and a Senior Member of IEEE.     

Smart-Aloha for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

This paper presents a novel slotted ALOHA-based protocol for use in ad hoc networks where nodes are equipped with adaptive array smart antennas. The protocol relies on the ability of the antenna and DoA (Direction of Arrival) algorithms to identify the direction of transmitters and then beamform appropriately to maximize SINR (Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio) at the receiver. The performance of the protocol is evaluated using analytical modeling as well as detailed simulation in OPNET and Matlab where we demonstrate the benefits of using smart antennas. The impact of using different number of antenna elements is also studied for this environment.This work is funded by the NSF under grant ANIR-0125728.Harkirat Singh is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Portland State University. He holds Master in Computer Science from Portland State University and B. E. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, India. After his under graduation he joined Automation division of Siemens AG. He has research interests in next-generation TCP/IP networking, Mobile Wireless Computing, Ad-hoc networking, and low-power lost-cost sensor networks.Suresh Singh received his B. Tech. Degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1984 and his Ph.D. degree in 1990 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, both in Computer Science. His areas of research include energy-efficient protocols for wireless networking, sensor networks, cellular networking with a focus on 3g standards, and performance evaluation. His work has been funded by several federal agencies such as NSF, DARPA, and ONR and by a variety of industries. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.     

Priority Scheduling in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks formed without the aid of any established infrastructure are typically multi-hop networks. Location dependent contention and hidden terminal problem make priority scheduling in multi-hop networks significantly different from that in wireless LANs. Most of the prior work related to priority scheduling addresses issues in wireless LANs. In this paper, priority scheduling in multi-hop networks is discussed. We propose a scheme using two narrow-band busy tone signals to ensure medium access for high priority source stations. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Xue Yang received the B.E. degree and the M.S. degree from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She is awarded Vodafone-U.S. Foundation Graduate Fellowship from 2003 to 2005. Her current research is in the areas of wireless networking and mobile computing, with the focus on medium access control, quality of service and topology control. Her research advisor is Prof. Nitin Vaidya at UIUC. For more information, please visit Nitin H. Vaidya received the PhD degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is presently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Sun Microsystems and the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay. His current research is in the areas of wireless networking and mobile computing. His research has been funded by various agencies, including the National Science Foundation, DARPA, BBN Technologies, Microsoft Research, and Sun Microsystems. Nitin Vaidya is a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. Nitin has served on the program committees of several conferences and workshops, and served as program co-chair for the 2003 ACM MobiCom. He has served as editor for several journals, and presently serves as Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as editor-in-chief of ACM SIGMOBILE periodical MC2R. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of the ACM. For more information, please visit     

QoS Aware Multi-Channel Scheduling for IEEE 802.15.3 Networks

From a multimedia applications perspective, there is an ever increasing demand for wireless devices with higher bandwidth to support high data rate flows. One possible solution to support the demand for higher bandwidth is to utilize the full spectrum by simultaneously using multiple channels for transmission. Recent approval by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has led to considerable interest in exploiting Ultra Wideband (UWB) access on an unlicensed basis in the 3.1--10.6 GHz band. Currently, the IEEE TG802.15.3a standards group is in the process of developing an alternative high-speed link layer design conformable with the IEEE 802.15.3 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) multiple access (MAC) protocol. One of the proposals, based on the concept of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), divides the spectrum into multiple bands and achieves channelization through the use of different time-frequency codes. These multiple channels can help satisfy the increasing demand for higher bandwidth in order to support high data rate multimedia applications. In this paper, we present a QoS-aware, multi-channel scheduling algorithm that simultaneously utilizes the various channels available in the UWB network. Aniruddha Rangnekar is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He received the B.E. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pune, India in 1998 and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2001. From January 2002 to date, he has been involved in graduate research in University of Maryland, Baltimore County. During the summer of 2004, he worked as the MAC development engineer at Staccato Communications, San Diego, CA. His current interests are in the areas of wireless ad hoc networks, multicast routing protocols, ultra wideband communications and MAC protocol development. He is a member of the MACSim group of the Multiband OFDM alliance (MBOA). Krishna M. Sivalingam is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSEE at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously, he was with the School of EECS at Washington State University, Pullman from 1997 until 2002; and with the University of North Carolina Greensboro from 1994 until 1997. He has also conducted research at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and at AT&T Labs in Whippany, NJ. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994 and 1990 respectively; and his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1988 from Anna University, Chennai (Madras), India. While at SUNY Buffalo, he was a Presidential Fellow from 1988 to 1991. His research interests include wireless networks, optical wavelength division multiplexed networks, and performance evaluation. He holds three patents in wireless networks and has published several research articles including more than thirty journal publications. He has published an edited book on Wireless Sensor Networks in 2004 and edited books on optical WDM networks in 2000 and 2004. He served as a Guest Co-Editor for special issues of the ACM MONET journal on “Wireless Sensor Networks” in 2003 and 2004; and an issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on optical WDM networks (2000). He is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Networks 2000 held in Singapore. His work has been supported by several sources including AFOSR, NSF, Cisco, Intel and Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Ad Hoc and Sensor Wireless Networks Journal, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He serves as Steering Committee Co-Chair for the International Conference on Broadband Networks (BroadNets) that was created in 2004. He is currently serving as General Co-Vice-Chair for the Second Annual International Mobiquitous conference to be held in San Diego in 2005 and as General Co-Chair for the First International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communication Networks to be held in Athens, Greece in Sep. 2005. He served as Technical Program Co-Chair for the First IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON) held at Santa Clara, CA in 2004; as General Co-Chair for SPIE Opticomm 2003 (Dallas, TX) and for ACM Intl. Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA) 2003 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2003 at San Diego, CA; as Technical Program Co-Chair of SPIE/IEEE/ACM OptiComm conference at Boston, MA in July 2002; and as Workshop Co-Chair for WSNA 2002 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2002 at Atlanta, GA in Sep 2002. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM.     

Performance of a burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol: Analysis and enhancement

In this paper, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the delay performance of the burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol under unsaturated conditions, which has not been fully addressed in the literature. Our delay analysis is unique in that we consider the end-to-end packet delay, which is the duration from the epoch that a packet enters the queue at the MAC layer of the transmitter side to the epoch that the packet is successfully received at the receiver side. The analytical results give excellent agreement with the simulation results, which represents the accuracy of our analytical model. The results also provide important guideline on how to set the parameters of the burst assembly policy. Based on these results, we further develop an efficient adaptive burst assembly policy so as to optimize the throughput and delay performance of the burst-frame-based CSMA/CA protocol. Kejie Lu received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2003. In 2004 and 2005, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His research interests include architecture and protocols design for computer and communication networks, performance analysis, network security, and wireless communications. Jianfeng Wang received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Florida in 2006. From January 2006 to July 2006, he was a research intern in wireless standards and technology group, Intel Corporation. In October 2006, he joined Philips Research North America as a senior member research staff in wireless communications and networking department. He is engaged in research and standardization on wireless networks with emphasis on medium access control (MAC). Dapeng Wu received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1990, M.E. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1997, and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2003. Since August 2003, he has been with Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, as an Assistant Professor. His research interests are in the areas of networking, communications, multimedia, signal processing, and information and network security. He received the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) Transactions Best Paper Award for Year 2001, and the Best Paper Award in International Conference on Quality of Service in Heterogeneous Wired/Wireless Networks (QShine) 2006. Currently, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Advances in Multimedia, and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing. He is also a guest-editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Special Issue on Cross-layer Optimized Wireless Multimedia Communications. He served as Program Chair for IEEE/ACM First International Workshop on Broadband Wireless Services and Applications (BroadWISE 2004); and as a technical program committee member of over 30 conferences. He is Vice Chair of Mobile and wireless multimedia Interest Group (MobIG), Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the Best Paper Award Committee, Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994 and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology from July 1998 to May 2000. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida in May 2000 as an assistant professor and got an early promotion to an associate professor with tenure in August 2003 and to a full professor in August 2005. He has published over 200 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He has served on several editorial boards of technical journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Wireless Networks. He have also been actively participating in professional conference organizations such as serving as The Steering Committee Co-Chair for QShine, the Technical Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Technical Program Symposium Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom’2004, and a member of Technical Program Committee for IEEE INFOCOM (1998, 2000, 2003–2007). He is a senior member of the IEEE.     

基于智能天线的Ad Hoc网络MAC协议

天线Ad Hoc网络已经广泛应用于各种无基础架构的环境中。阐述了基于智能天线的Ad Hoc网络MAC协议研究领域的最新进展。对Ad Hoc网络中的隐节点和暴露节点问题作了分析,并对智能天线技术的实现机制进行了简要的概括。在介绍典型MAC协议的基础上,指出了未来MAC协议设计的研究方向,指出基于智能天线的MAC协议研究具有很好的发展前景。     

QoS Mechanisms for the MAC Protocol of IEEE 802.11 WLANs

There are two essential ingredients in order for any telecommunications system to be able to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees: connection admission control (CAC) and service differentiation. In wireless local area networks (WLANs), it is essential to carry out these functions at the MAC level. The original version of IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol for WLANs does not include either function. The IEEE 802.11e draft standard includes new features to facilitate and promote the provision of QoS guarantees, but no specific mechanisms are defined in the protocol to avoid over saturating the medium (via CAC) or to decide how to assign the available resources (via service differentiation through scheduling). This paper introduces specific mechanisms for both admission control and service differentiation into the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The main contributions of this work are a novel CAC algorithm for leaky-bucket constrained traffic streams, an original frame scheduling mechanism referred to as DM-SCFQ, and a simulation study of the performance of a WLAN including these features. This work has been partly funded by the Mexican Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) through grant 38833-A. José R. Gallardo received the B.Sc. degree in Physics and Mathematics from the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from CICESE Research and Graduate Education Center in Ensenada, Mexico, and the D.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the George Washington University, Washington, DC. From 1997 to 2000 he worked as a Research Associate at the Advanced Communications Engineering Centre of the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. From May to December 2000, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broadband Wireless and Internetworking Research Laboratory of the University of Ottawa. Since December 2000, Dr. Gallardo has been with the Electronics and Telecommunications Department of CICESE Research Center, where he is a full professor. His main areas of interest are traffic modeling, traffic control, as well as simulation and performance evaluation of broadband communications networks, with recent emphasis on wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Paúl Medina received the B.Eng. degree from the Sonora Institute of Technology, Obregon, Mexico, and the M.Sc. degree from CICESE Research and Graduate Education Center, Ensenada, Mexico, both in Electrical Engineering. From July to September 2005, he worked as a Research Associate at the Broadband Wireless and Internetworking Research Laboratory of the University of Ottawa, Canada. Mr. Medina is currently with CENI²T, Ensenada, Mexico, working as a lead engineer in projects related to routing and access control in wireless sensor networks, as well as IP telephony over wireless LANs. Weihua Zhuang received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees from Dalian Maritime University, Liaoning, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Since October 1993, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, where she is a full professor. She is a co-author of the textbook Wireless Communications and Networking (Prentice Hall, 2003). Dr. Zhuang received the Outstanding Performance Award in 2005 from the University of Waterloo, and the Premier’s Research Excellence Award in 2001 from the Ontario Government. She is an Editor/Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, and International Journal of Sensor Networks. Her current research interests include multimedia wireless communications, wireless networks, and radio positioning.     

Dynamically anchored conferencing handoff for dual-mode cellular/WLAN handsets

In this paper we consider vertical handoff for enterprise-based dual-mode (DM) cellular/WLAN handsets. When the handset roams out of WLAN coverage, the DM's cellular interface is used to maintain the call by anchoring it through an enterprise PSTN gateway/PBX. Soft handoff can be achieved in this case if the gateway supports basic conference bridging, since a new leg of the call can be established to the conference bridge while the existing media stream path is active. Unfortunately this requires that all intra-enterprise calls be routed through the gateway when the call is established. In this paper we consider a SIP based architecture to perform conferenced dual-mode handoff and propose a much more scalable mechanism for short-delay environments, whereby active calls are handed off into the conference bridge prior to the initiation of the vertical handoff. Results are presented which are taken from a dual-mode handset testbed, from analytic models, and from simulations which characterize the scalability of the proposed mechanism. Mohammed Smadi received the B.Eng and Mgmt and M.A.Sc degrees in Computer Engineering from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Mohammed received an NSERC doctoral award in 2005 and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Wireless Networking Group at McMaster University. 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 he 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. 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 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. He 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. Vytas Kezys was born in Hamilton, Canada in 1957. He received the B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University, Canada, in 1979. From 1979 to 1998, Mr. Kezys was involved in radar and communications research as Principal Research Engineer at the Communications Research Laboratory, McMaster University. While at McMaster, his research activities included array signal processing for low-angle tracking radar, radar signal processing, and smart antennas for wireless communications. Mr. Kezys was founder and President of TalariCom Inc., a start-up company that developed cost effective smart antenna technologies for broadband wireless access applications. Currently, Mr. Kezys is Director of Advanced Products at Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada. Vahid S. Azhari received his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, IUST and University of Tehran, Iran, in 2000 and 2003 respectively. His M.S. research focused on designing scheduling algorithms for switch fabrics. He also worked for two years for the Iranian Telecommunication Research Centre on developing software for SDH switches. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree at the Wireless Networking Laboratory, McMaster University, Canada. His main area of research includes handoff management in integrated wireless networks, WLAN deployment techniques, and wireless mesh networks. 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 cellular networks and integrated cellular and ad hoc networks. Dr. Zhao is a member of the IEEE.     

Simulation and analysis of node throughput using smart antenna in wireless mesh networks

Smart antenna technology is introduced to wireless mesh networks. Smart antennas based wider-range access medium access control (MAC) protocol (SWAMP) is used as MAC protocol for IEEE 802.11 mesh networks in this study. The calculation method of node throughput in chain and arbitrary topology is proposed under nodes fairness guarantee. Network scale and interference among nodes are key factors that influence node throughput. Node distribution pattern near the gateway also affects the node throughput. Experiment based on network simulator-2 (NS-2) simulation platform compares node throughput between smart antenna scenario and omni-antenna scenario. As smart antenna technology reduces the bottle collision domain, node throughput increases observably.     

Enhancement of a WLAN-Based Internet Service

A wireless LAN (WLAN)-based Internet service, called NESPOT, of Korea Telecom (KT), the biggest telecommunication and Internet service company in Korea, has been operational since early 2002. As the numbers of subscribers and deployed access points (APs) increase, KT has been endeavoring to improve its service quality as well as the network management. In this paper, we introduce a joint effort between Seoul National University (SNU) and KT to achieve it. We have been addressing two major issues as part of the joint project thus far: (1) a unified WLAN management/maintenance tool; and (2) real-time traffic support enhancement. We present our on-going efforts as well as some preliminary results. Some issues, which need further attention for the future NESPOT service enhancement, are also introduced.The work reported in this paper was financed and supported by KT. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of KT. Youngkyu Choi is an M.S. candidate in the department of electrical engineering at Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. He received his B.S. with honors in electrical engineering from SNU in 2002. He has a lot of project experiences related with system software development. His current research interests are the design of MAC layer from distributed system to centralized cellular system, resource management in next-generation (4G) cellular system, and mathematical analysis of system performance. He had served in the Korean Army for 3 years from 1998. Sekyu Park is a research staff at the Multimedia & Wireless Networking Lab. (MWNL), Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. Before joining MWNL in September 2003, he was with MMC Technology, Seoul, Korea as a Research Staff for five years. His current research interests are in the area of wireless/mobile networks and embedded OS. Sunghyun Choi is an assistant professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea. Before joining SNU in September 2002, he was with Philips Research USA, Briarcliff Manor, New York, USA as a Senior Member Research Staff and a project leader for three years. He received his B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and received Ph.D. at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in September, 1999. His current research interests are in the area of wireless/mobile networks with emphasis on the QoS guarantee and adaptation, resource management, wireless LAN and PAN, next-generation mobile networks, data link layer protocols, and connection and mobility management. He authored/coauthored over 45 technical papers and book chapters in the areas of wireless/mobile networks and communications. He is the technical program co-chair for ACM International Workshop on Wireless Mobile Applications and Services on WLAN Hotspots (WMASH’2004). He is currently serving on program committees of a number of leading wireless and networking conferences including IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE GLOBECOM, and IEEE VTC. He is also a guest co-editor for a special issue on “Emerging WLAN Applications and Technologies” of Wiley Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Journal. He is an active participant and contributor of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standardization committee. Dr. Choi was a recipient of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies Scholarship and the Korean Government Overseas Scholarship during 1997–1999 and 1994–1997, respectively. Go Woon Lee is a researcher at Service Development Laboratory, Korea Telecom (KT), Seoul, Korea. She received her B.S. degrees in computer science and material engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1995. She was with Microsoft Korea R&D Group as a research staff in 1995. She received M.S. degree in information & communication from Kwang-Ju Institute of Science and Technology (K-JIST) in 1998. Her current research interests are in the area of wireless/mobile networks with emphasis on data link layer protocols, remote diagnosis, and wireless service management. Jaehwan Lee is a researcher at Korea Telecom (KT), Seoul, Korea. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University (SNU) in 1998 and 2000, respectively. His master’s research was about estimation theory related to Global Positioning System (GPS) and image processing in robot soccer. His current research interest is to analyze and enhance the performance of wireless/mobile networks (IEEE 802.11, sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks) regarding QoS, energy-efficiency and high-throughput considering hand-off and inter-networking with heterogeneous networks. Before joining wireless LAN group in KT, he developed the Web-GIS (Geographical Information System) client-server system from 2000 to 2001. Hanwook Jung, Ph.D joined KT in 1985 and got his Ph.D degree with the company finalcial scholarship of KT from 1991 to 1996 at SUNY at Buffalo. His thesis is about “Wireless signal transmission over Fiber by subcarrier multiplexing” which is current heavily utilized for PCS and cellular repeater line. From 1985 to 1991, he had developed a Videotex service which is now known as Hitel. From 1996 to 1999, he developed 26GHz broadband wireless local loop system and contributed to get the license from the government. Since 1999, he has led a business model and service with wireless LAN. The KT Wi-Fi public service, “NESPOT” has 300,000 subscribers and 10,000 public hotspots. In 2003 he was promoted as an assistant vice president leading NESPOT research team to enhance KT’s broadband with 5,000,000 subscribers. His vision regarding next generation communications service is believed to be true by combining the broadband access and wireless technology including WiFi wireless LAN, UWB, and bluetooth in those areas such as wireless home-networking, device-to-device communications, and ubiqutous networking.This revised version was published online in August 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

An Investigation of MIMO Performance in the Indoor Ricean Environment

In this paper, we investigate the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channel capacity in indoor Ricean channels based on MIMO channel measurements at 2.45 GHz. The measured data is analysed using a super resolution parameter estimation algorithm. Our results demonstrate that the line-of-sight (LOS) component in a Ricean scenario influences indoor MIMO performance through increased spatial correlation between array elements. We found that indoor channels with higher values of Ricean K factor have smaller numbers of effective multipath components and increased spatial correlation. Measurement results also showed that, the effect of varying antenna height on indoor MIMO capacity is also due to the spatial correlation of multipath propagation and has a close relationship with the separation between the transmitter and receiver. Zhongwei Tang is currently with the Wireless Technologies Laboratory at CSIRO. He was with Microwave and Wireless Technology Research Laboratory (MWTRL), Information and Communication Group, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where he pursued his Ph.D. Degree. His current research interests include RF propagation, MIMO Space-Time channel measurements, characterization and channel modelling, smart antennas, MIMO systems and array signal processing. Ananda S. Mohan is currently a member of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia where he leads research on antennas, microwaves, wave propagation, and wireless technology. He received a Ph.D. degree in electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India and was a Scientist and Senior Scientist at the Research and Training Unit for Navigational Electronics, Hyderabad, India. At UTS, he directed the Sydney microwave design resource centre and was the associate program leader of the co-operative research centre for satellite systems. He currently directs the microwave and wireless technology research laboratory and a core member of the university research centre on health technologies. His current teaching and research interests include wireless mobile communications, microwaves and antennas, smart antennas and applications of microwave and wireless technology in medicine and has obtained many competitive research grants in these areas. Dr. Mohan was a co-recipient of the Priestly memorial award from the Institute of Radio and Electronic Engineers (IREE), Australia. He was a member of the organizing and technical Program Committees of the IEEE Globecom'98, APMC 2000, and International Symposium on Wireless Systems and Networks, 2003 and IASTED International Conference on Antennas, Radar, and Wave Propagation, for 2004 and 2005.     

A rendezvous reservation protocol for energy constrained wireless infrastructure networks

This paper considers a low power wireless infrastructure network that uses multi-hop communications to provide end user connectivity. A generalized Rendezvous Reservation Protocol (RRP) is proposed which permits multi-hop infrastructure nodes to adapt their power consumption in a dynamic fashion. When nodes have a long-term association, power consumption can be reduced by having them periodically rendezvous for the purpose of exchanging data packets. In order to support certain applications, the system invokes a connection set up process to establish the end-to-end path and selects node rendezvous rates along the intermediate nodes to meet the application’s quality of service (QoS) needs. Thus, the design challenge is to dynamically determine rendezvous intervals based on incoming applications’ QoS needs, while conserving battery power. In this paper, we present the basic RRP mechanism and an enhanced mechanism called Rendezvous Reservation Protocol with Battery Management (RRP-BM) that incorporates node battery level information. The performance of the system is studied using discrete-event simulation based experiments for different network topologies. The chief metrics considered are average power consumption and system lifetime (that is to be maximized). The QoS metrics specified are packet latency and end-to-end setup latency. It is shown that the use of the RRP-BM can increase the lifetime up to 48% as compared to basic RRP by efficiently reducing the energy consumption. This work was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Communications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO). Part of the research was supported by Air Force Office of Scientific Research grants F-49620-97-1-0471 and F-49620-99-1-0125; Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, Adelphi, Maryland; and Intel Corporation. The authors may be reached via e-mail at todd@mcmaster. ca, krishna@umbc. edu. The basic RRP mechanism was presented at the IASTED International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications, Banff, Canada, July 2002. Subalakshmi Venugopal received her Bachelors in Computer Science from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India and her M.S. degree in Computer Science from Washington State University. She interned as a student researcher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Ms. Venugopal is currently employed with Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA and is part of the “Kids and Education Group”. Her research interests include low power wireless ad hoc networks. Zhengwei (Wesley) Chen received the M.E. in Electrical & Computer Engineering Dept from McMaster University in Canada in 2002. He joined Motorola Inc. as a CDMA2000 system engineer in 2000. In 2002, he joined UTStarcom as a manager of the Global Service Solution Department. He is currently in charge of R&D for Advanced Services related to the TVoIP and Softswitch products. Terry Todd received the B.A.Sc, M.A.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. While at Waterloo he also spent 3 years as a Research Associate with the Computer Communications Networks Group (CCNG). During that time he worked on the Waterloo Experimental Local Area Network, which was an early local area network testbed. In 1991 Dr. Todd was on research leave in the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. He also spent 1998 as a visiting researcher at The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) in Cambridge, England. While at ORL he worked on the piconet project, which was an embedded low power wireless network testbed. Dr. Todd 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 major research projects in the optical and wireless networking areas. He currently directs a large group working on wireless mesh networks and wireless VoIP. Professor Todd holds the NSERC/RIM/CITO Chair on Pico-Cellular Wireless Internet Access Networks. Dr. Todd’s research interests include metropolitan/local area networks, wireless communications and the performance analysis of computer communication networks and systems. Professor Todd is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario. Krishna M. Sivalingam is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSEE at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously, he was with the School of EECS at Washington State University, Pullman from 1997 until 2002; and with the University of North Carolina Greensboro from 1994 until 1997. He has also conducted research at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and at AT&T Labs in Whippany, NJ. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994 and 1990 respectively; and his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1988 from Anna University, Chennai (Madras), India. While at SUNY Buffalo, he was a Presidential Fellow from 1988 to 1991. His research interests include wireless networks, optical wavelength division multiplexed networks, and performance evaluation. He holds three patents in wireless networks and has published several research articles including more than thirty journal publications. He has published an edited book on Wireless Sensor Networks in 2004 and edited books on optical WDM networks in 2000 and 2004. He served as a Guest Co-Editor for special issues of the ACM MONET journal on “Wireless Sensor Networks” in 2003 and 2004; and an issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on optical WDM networks (2000). He is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Networks 2000 held in Singapore. His work has been supported by several sources including AFOSR, NSF, Cisco, Intel and Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Ad Hoc and Sensor Wireless Networks Journal, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He serves as Steering Committee Co-Chair for IEEE/CreateNet International Conference on Broadband Networks (BroadNets) that was created in 2004. He is currently serving as General Co-Vice-Chair for the Second Annual International Mobiquitous conference to be held in San Diego in 2005 and as General Co-Chair for the First IEEE/CreateNet International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communication Networks (SecureComm) to be held in Athens, Greece in Sep. 2005. He served as Technical Program Co-Chair for the First IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON) held at Santa Clara, CA in 2004; as General Co-Chair for SPIE Opticomm 2003 (Dallas, TX) and for ACM Intl. Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA) 2003 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2003 at San Diego, CA; as Technical Program Co-Chair of SPIE/IEEE/ACM OptiComm conference at Boston, MA in July 2002; and as Workshop Co-Chair for WSNA 2002 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2002 at Atlanta, GA in Sep 2002. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM.     

A scalable, power-efficient broadcast algorithm for wireless networks

Scalability and power-efficiency are two of the most important design challenges in wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present a scalable, power-efficient broadcast algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks. We first investigate the trade-off between (i) reaching more nodes in a single hop using higher transmission power and (ii) reaching fewer nodes using lower transmission power and relaying messages through multiple hops. Our analysis indicates that multi-hop broadcast is more power-efficient if α ≥ 2.2, where α is the path loss exponent in the power consumption model P(r,α) = c₀⋅ r^α+c₁. Based on the analysis, we then propose Broadcast over Local Spanning Subgraph (BLSS). In BLSS, an underlying topology is first constructed by a localized topology control algorithm, Fault-Tolerant Local Spanning Subgraph (FLSS). FLSS can preserve k-connectivity of the network, where the value of k determines the degree of fault tolerance. Broadcast messages are then simply relayed through the derived topology in a constrained flooding fashion. BLSS is fully localized, scalable, power-efficient, and fault-tolerant. Simulation results show that the performance of BLSS is comparable to that of centralized algorithms. Ning Li received the B.E. and M.E. degrees from Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, PR China, in 1998 and 1999, respectively, and the M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, in 2001 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. His research interests include design and analysis of wireless mobile ad hoc networks and sensor networks, large-scale network simulation and emulation, and distributed and mobile computing. Jennifer C. Hou received her Ph.D. from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI in 1993. She is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. Dr. Hou has been supervising several federally and industry funded projects in the areas of network modeling and simualtion, network measurement and diagnostics, enabling communication software for assisted living, and both the theoretical and protocol design aspects of wireless sensor networks. She has published (with her former advisor, students, and colleagues) over 125 papers and book chapters in archived journals and peer-reviewed conferences, and released a truly extensible, reusable, component-based, compositional network simulation and emulation package, J-Sim. She has also served on the TPC of several major networking, real-time, and distributed systems conferences/symposiums, such as IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICNP, IEEE ICDCS, IEEE RTSS, IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecome, ACM Mobicom, and ACM Sigmetrics. She is the Technical Program Co-chair of 27th IEEE INFOCOM 2008, First International Wireless Internet Conference 2005, ACM 3rd Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2004) and IEEE Real-time Technology and Application Symposium (RTAS 2000). She is severing on the editorial board of IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications, IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine, ACM/Kluwer Wireless Networks, Kluwer Computer Networks, and ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks. Dr. Hou was a recipient of an ACM Recognition of Service Award in 2004, a Lumley Research Award from The Ohio State University in 2001, a NSF CAREER award in 1996–2000 and a Women in Science Intiative Award from The University of Wisconsin—Madison in 1993–1995.     

Location-aware resource management in mobile ad hoc networks

We propose an innovative resource management scheme for TDMA based mobile ad hoc networks. Since communications between some important nodes in the network are more critical, they should be accepted by the network with high priority in terms of network resource usage and quality of service (QoS) support. In this scheme, we design a location-aware bandwidth pre-reservation mechanism, which takes advantage of each mobile node’s geographic location information to pre-reserve bandwidth for such high priority connections and thus greatly reduces potential scheduling conflicts for transmissions. In addition, an end-to-end bandwidth calculation and reservation algorithm is proposed to make use of the pre-reserved bandwidth. In this way, time slot collisions among different connections and in adjacent wireless links along a connection can be reduced so that more high priority connections can be accepted into the network without seriously hurting admissions of other connections. The salient feature of our scheme is the collaboration between the routing and MAC layer that results in the more efficient spatial reuse of limited resources, which demonstrates how cross-layer design leads to better performance in QoS support. Extensive simulations show that our scheme can successfully provide better communication quality to important nodes at a relatively low price. Finally, several design issues and future work are discussed. Xiang Chen received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Afterwards, he worked as a MTS (member of technical staff) in Bell Laboratories, Beijing, China. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. His research is focused on protocol design and performance evaluation in wireless networks, including cellular networks, wireless LANs, and mobile ad hoc networks. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and a student member of IEEE. Wei Liu received the BE and ME degrees in electrical engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He is currently pursuing the P.hD. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, where he is a research assistant in the Wireless Networks Laboratory (WINET). His research interest includes QoS, secure and power efficient routing, and MAC protocols in mobile ad hoc networks and sensor networks. He is a student member of the IEEE. Hongqiang Zhai received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in July 1999 and January 2002 respectively. He worked as a research intern in Bell Labs Research China from June 2001 to December 2001, and in Microsoft Research Asia from January 2002 to July 2002. Currently he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida. He is a student member of IEEE. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. From June 1997 to July 1998, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. From July 1998 to May 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. In May 2000, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida where he got the early promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in August 2003 and to Full Professor in August 2005. He has published over 180 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He is currently serving as an Editor for many journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEETransactions on Mobile Computing, and ACM Wireless Networks. He is also actively participating in conference organization such as the Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Program Co-Chair for the Global Internet and Next Generation Networks Symposium in IEEE Globecom’2004 and the Program Vice Chair for 2000 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’2000).     

MAC protocols using directional antennas in IEEE 802.11 based ad hoc networks

Using directional antennas can be beneficial for wireless ad hoc networks consisting of a collection of wireless hosts. The most important benefit includes a reduction of the radio interference. Thus, it can significantly increase the spatial reuse, thereby improving the network throughput. To best utilize directional antennas, a suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol must be designed. Current MAC protocols, such as the IEEE 802.11 standard, do not benefit when using directional antennas, because these protocols have been designed for omnidirectional antennas. In this paper, we present modified MAC protocols suitable for 802.11 based ad hoc networks using directional antennas. Our comprehensive simulation results demonstrate the performance improvement obtained with the proposed protocols. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Scalable Multiple Channel Scheduling with Optimal Utility in Wireless Local Area Networks

This paper studies scheduling algorithms for an infra-structure based wireless local area network with multiple simultaneous transmission channels. A reservation-based medium access control protocol is assumed where the base station (BS) allocates transmission slots to the system mobile stations based on their requests. Each station is assumed to have a tunable transmitter and tunable receiver. For this network architecture, the scheduling algorithms can be classified into two categories: contiguous and non-contiguous, depending on whether slots are allocated contiguously to the mobile stations. The main objective of the scheduling algorithms is to achieve high channel utility while having low time complexity. In this paper, we propose three scheduling algorithms termed contiguous sorted sequential allocation (CSSA), non-contiguous round robin allocation (NCRRA) and non-contiguous sorted round robin allocation (NCSRRA). Among these, CSSA schedules each station in contiguous mode, while other two algorithms, NCRRA and NCSRRA, schedule stations in non-contiguous mode. Through extensive analysis and simulation, the results demonstrate that the CSSA with only slightly increased complexity can achieve much higher channel utility when compared to the existing contiguous scheduling algorithms. The NCRRA and NCSRRA on the other hand, results in significantly lower complexity, while still achieving the optimal channel utility compared to existing non-contiguous scheduling algorithms. Chonggang Wang received a B.Sc. (honors) degree from Northwestern Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China, in 1996, and M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in communication and information system from University of Electrical Science and Technology in China, Chengdu, China, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From September 2002 to November 2003 he has been with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, where he is an associate researcher in the Department of Computer Science. He is now a post-doctoral research fellow in University of Arkansas, Arkansas. His current research interests are in wireless networks with QoS guarantee, sensor networks, peer-to-peer and overlay networks. Bo Li received the B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in the Computer Science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, P. R. China, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in the Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993. Between 1994 and 1996, he worked on high performance routers and ATM switches in IBM Networking System Division, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Since January 1996, he has been with Computer Science Department, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he is an associated professor and co-director for the ATM/IP cooperate research center, a government sponsored research center. Since 1999, he has also held an adjunct researcher position at the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Beijing, China. His current research interests include wireless mobile networking supporting multimedia, video multicast and all optical networks using WDM, in which he has published over 150 technical papers in referred journals and conference proceedings. He has been an editor or a guest editor for 16 journals, and involved in the organization of about 40 conferences. He was the Co-TPC Chair for IEEE Infocom'2004. He is a member of ACM and a senior member of IEEE. Krishna M. Sivalingam (ACM ‘93) is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSEE at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously, he was with the School of EECS at Washington State University, Pullman from 1997 until 2002; and with the University of North Carolina Greensboro from 1994 until 1997. He has also conducted research at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and at AT&T Labs in Whippany, NJ. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1990 and 1994 respectively; and his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 1988 from Anna University, Chennai (Madras), India. While at SUNY Buffalo, he was a Presidential Fellow from 1988 to 1991. His research interests include wireless networks, optical wavelength division multiplexed networks, and performance evaluation. He holds three patents in wireless networks and has published several research articles including more than twenty-five journal publications. He has published an edited book on Wireless Sensor Networks in 2004 and on optical networks in 2000 and in 2004. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He has served as a Guest Co-Editor for special issues of ACM MONET on “Wireless Sensor Networks” in 2003 and 2004 and an issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on optical WDM networks (2000). He is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Networks 2000 held in Singapore. His work has been supported by several sources including AFOSR, NSF, Cisco, Intel and Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences. He is a member of the Editorial Board for ACM Wireless Networks Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and KICS Journal of Computer Networks. He is serving as Technical Program Co-Chair for the First IEEE Conference on Sensor Communications and Networking to be held in Santa Clara, CA in 2004. He has served as General Co-Chair for SPIE Opticomm 2003 (Dallas, TX) and for ACM Intl. Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA) 2003 held on conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2003 at San Diego, CA. He served as Technical Program Co-Chair of SPIE/IEEE/ACM OptiComm conference at Boston, MA in July 2002; and as Workshop Co-Chair for WSNA 2002 held in conjunction with ACM MobiCom 2002 at Atlanta, GA in Sep 2002. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Kazem Sohraby received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and the MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadephia. He is a Professor of the Electrical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Prior to that, he was with Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ. His areas of interest include computer networking, signaling, switching, performance analysis, and traffic theory. He has over 20 applications and granted patents on computer protocols, wireless and optical systems, circuit and packet switching, and on optical Internet. He has several publications, including a book on The Performance and Control of Computer Communications Networks (Boston, MA: 1995). Dr Sohraby is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society, and serves as its President's representative on the Committee on Communications and Information Policy (CCIP). He served on the Education Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, is on the Editorial Boards of several publications, and served as Reviewer and Panelist with the National Science Foundation, the US Army and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

SYN-MAC: A Distributed Medium Access Control Protocol for Synchronized Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol, called SYN-MAC (for SYNchronized MAC), based on a binary countdown approach tailored for wireless networks. SYN-MAC has several attractive features such as simplicity, robustness, high efficiency, fairness, and quality of service capability. We evaluate SYN-MAC in terms of collision probability, system throughput, and packet delay, via both analysis and simulation. Our results show that, with properly chosen parameters, SYN-MAC can achieve a very low collision probability, packet delay tolerance, and extremely high channel efficiency (of > 90%) under a wide range of traffic load. As a result, SYN-MAC may serve as an alternative to IEEE 802.11 for the wireless stations in synchronized networks.This work is supported in part by National Science Foundation CAREER Award under Award Number CNS-0347686, by U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) under Award Number DE-FG02-04ER46136, and by Board of Regents, State of Louisiana under Contract Number No. DOE/LEQSF(2004-07)-ULL and LEQSF(2003-06)-RD-A-37. Part of this work was presented in the student poster session of IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) 2003, Atlanta, GA.Hongyi Wu is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS), University of Louisiana (UL) at Lafayette. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science and M.S. degree in electrical engineering from State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 2002 and 2000, respectively. He received his B.S. degree in scientific instruments from Zhejiang University in 1996. His research interests include wireless mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, next generation cellular systems, and integrated heterogeneous wireless systems. He has served as symposium chair, session chair, and technical committee member of several IEEE conferences, and a guest editor of ACM MONET special issue on Integration of Heterogeneous Wireless Technologies. He has published more than two dozens of technical papers in leading journals and conference proceedings.Anant P. Utgikar (S’03) graduated with B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT—Bombay in 2001. He received M.S. in Computer Engineering from Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette) in 2003. Presently he is working towards Ph.D. at UL Lafayette. His research interests include computer networking, logic design, software, simulation, mobile computing and distributed systems. His contributions to network simulator NS2 were ranked in top-5 of over 240,000 pages by Google. He has won many programming competitions, IEEE, IEE technical paper presentation contests as undergraduate and High School Science-Math Olympiads in India. He was honored by Govt. of India for outstanding performance at national level in XII-th. He has authored a book chapter on Reservation Based MAC protocols. He has published in IEEE ICNP’03, IEEE SiPS’03 and IEEE CAMP’03. He was invited with travel grant to NS2 workshop’02 at USC/ISI, ICNP’03 and SiPS’03. He has been in organizing team of IEEE CAMP 2003 and CyberSecurity Workshop 2003. He has served as Reviewer for IEEE-VTC and ACM-MONET. He has held positions of Student Government Senator and Secretary, Graduate Students Organization at UL Lafayette. He has contributed as volunteer to National Science-Technology-Math ESTME Week organised by NSF and DoE, USA.Nian-Feng Tzeng received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1987, he has been with Center for Advanced Computer Studies, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he is currently a professor. His current research interest is in the areas of computer communications and networks, high-performance computer systems, parallel and distributed processing and fault-tolerant computing. He was on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 1998–2001, and on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, 1994–1998. He served as a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society, 1994–1997, and was the Chair of Technical Committee on Distributed Processing, the IEEE Computer Society, from 1999 till 2002. He has been on the technical program committees of various conferences and will serve as the Technical Program Chair of the 10th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, July 2004.Dr. Tzeng is the recipient of the outstanding paper award of the 10th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, May 1990. He received the University Foundation Distinguished Professor Award in 1997.