QoS support for integrated services over CATV

Cable TV has emerged as a promising access network infrastructure for the delivery of voice, video, and high-speed data traffic. A central issue in the design of protocols for CATV networks is to support different levels of QoS for diverse user applications. While CATV service providers and equipment have standardized, in the so-called MCNS protocol, the basic network architecture and interfaces, issues in the MAC layer for QoS support are likely to be left for differentiation in vendor products. This article first presents an overview of the basic CATV network architectural assumptions and the set of QoS requirements for supporting integrated services over CATV. It then discusses a MAC layer scheduling protocol that can efficiently multiplex constant bit rate traffic, such as voice over IP with guaranteed delay bound, and best-effort traffic, such as data services with minimum bit rate guarantee, while achieving fairness on any excess available bandwidth. The performance of this algorithm is illustrated by simulation results using Opnet. We also discuss a dynamic polling mechanism that enhances the link utilization while preserving delay bounds for latency-critical traffic     

Priority-guaranteed MAC protocol for emerging wireless body area networks

The newly emerging wireless body area networks (WBANs) are intended to support both medical applications and consumer electronic (CE) applications. These two types of applications present diverse service requirements. To satisfy both medical and CE applications with a uniform medium access control (MAC) protocol becomes a new challenge for the WBAN. Addressing this problem, a priority-guaranteed MAC protocol is proposed in this paper. In this protocol, data channels are separated from control channels to support collision-free high data rate communication for CE applications. Priority-specific control channels are adopted to provide priority guarantee to life-critical medical applications. Traffic-specific data channels are deployed to improve resource efficiency and latency performance. Moreover, in order to further minimize energy consumption and access latency, an asynchronous wakeup trigger mode is proposed as an enhancement to the priority traffic. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for performance evaluation. As compared with IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and its improved versions, the priority-guaranteed MAC demonstrates significant improvements on throughput and energy efficiency with a tolerable penalty on latency performance of bursty traffic in CE applications. Therefore, the customized priority-guaranteed MAC satisfies the service requirements of WBAN by making tradeoff among the performances of different applications.     

QoS-oriented packet scheduling for wireless multimedia CDMA communications

In the third-generation (and beyond) wireless communication systems, there will be a mixture of different traffic classes, each having its own transmission rate characteristics and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, a QoS-oriented medium access control (MAC) protocol with fair packet loss sharing (FPLS) scheduling is proposed for wireless code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications. The QoS parameters under consideration are the transmission bit error rate (BER), packet loss, and delay requirements. The MAC protocol exploits both time-division and code-division statistical multiplexing. The BER requirements are guaranteed by properly arranging simultaneous packet transmissions and controlling there transmit power levels, whereas the packet loss and delay requirements are guaranteed by proper packet scheduling. The basic idea of FPLS is to schedule the transmission of multimedia packets in such a way that all the users have a fair share of packet loss according to their QoS requirements, which maximizes the number of the served users under the QoS constraints. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of the FPLS scheduler, in comparison with other previously proposed scheduling algorithms.     

FPS‐MAC: Fuzzy priority scheduling‐based MAC protocol for intelligent monitoring systems

Recent advances in microelectronics have encouraged the implementation of a wireless sensor network (WSN) in intelligent monitoring systems (IMSs). The IMS for time‐critical applications requires timely and reliable data delivery without sacrificing the energy efficiency of the network. This paper proposes FPS‐MAC, a fuzzy priority scheduling‐based medium access control protocol, designed for event critical traffic in hierarchical WSN. The FPS‐MAC allows time‐critical event traffic to opportunistically steal the data slots allocated for periodic data traffic in event‐based situations. Additionally, a fuzzy logic‐based slot scheduling mechanism is introduced to provide guaranteed and timely medium access to emergency traffic load and ensures the quality‐of‐service (QoS) requirements of IMSs. Both analytical and simulation results for data throughput, energy consumption, and transmission delay of FPS‐MAC, TLHA, E‐BMA, and BMA‐RR have been analyzed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FPS‐MAC protocol.     

一种无线ATM网络的MAC协议

主要研究了无线ATM网络对MAC的需求，并介绍了适用于无线ATM的一种新的MAC方案。该协议支持不同类型信息传输，比如恒定比特率（CBR），可变比特率（VBR），可用比特率（ABR），未指定比特率（UBR）。另外此协议还提供了对宽带ATM主干网的无缝连接。同时也支持与ATM相关的QoS级别。对于该协议关注的各种情况的主要原理进行了讨论。     

Efficient Patient Care Through Wireless Body Area Networks—Enhanced Technique for Handling Emergency Situations with Better Quality of Service

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) is a wireless network of sensors placed in and around the human body for monitoring the patient conditions remotely. The goal of WBAN networks is to report the patient condition to the monitoring system with maximum reliability and minimum delay and deliver the life critical data in the emergency situation with utmost priority. The proposed MAC protocol is aimed at delivery of emergency packets with maximum reliability and minimum delay through the introduction of mini slots in the beacon enabled superframe for exclusive transmission of the same. To improve the packet delivery ratio of the normal packets and decrease the energy consumption of the low data rate nodes, a packet rate based scheduled slot allocation is added to this protocol. Extensive simulations show that the proposed protocol is able to achieve nearly 98% packet delivery ratio and less than 100 ms delay for emergency packets. By varying the number of allocated scheduled slots based on the packet rate of the nodes, the proposed protocol has shown improved performance in the packet delivery ratio (93%) of normal packets as compared to IEEE 802.15.6 (85%), also the energy consumption of low data rate nodes has decreased by 64%. The results show that the proposed protocol is successful in realizing much better delay and packet delivery values for emergency and normal packets.     

Performance optimization of duty‐cycled MAC in delay‐energy constrained sensor network under uniform and nonuniform traffic generation

Duty‐cycle at the media access control (MAC) layer plays a key role in energy savings and network lifetime extension. It consists in putting a node's radio in the sleep state as soon as it has no communication activity. Traditional wireless sensor network MAC protocols are designed with short duty‐cycles at the cost of long delays. Careful design is required for joint energy‐delay constrained applications, where the optimal parameters should be thoroughly derived. The present paper deals with this issue and mathematically derives optimal values of key MAC parameters under low data rate applications for 3 well‐known duty‐cycled MAC protocols, WiseMAC, SCP‐MAC, and LMAC as representatives of 3 MAC protocol categories, respectively, preamble‐sampling, slotted contention‐based, and frame‐based. The analysis provides also the optimum traffic sampling rate that guarantees the minimum energy consumption. It shows the role of these parameters in achieving the targeted end‐to‐end delay constraints under network models with uniform traffic generation, for ring and grid topologies. As a second contribution, the model is extended to nonuniform traffic scenarios, where a certain percentage of deployed nodes are relays whose role is to balance traffic forwarding and save the overall network energy. The results reveal that different optimal internal MAC parameters and traffic generation rates can be found for different configurations of relay nodes deployment, which achieve minimal network energy consumption while satisfying the application required end‐to‐end delay threshold.     

ETPS-MAC: Energy Traffic Priority Scheduling-based QoS-aware MAC protocol for hierarchical WSNs

The evolution of the wireless sensor network (WSN) in recent years has reached its greatest heights and applications are increasing day by day, one such application is Smart Monitoring Systems (SMSs) which is in vision of implementation in every urban and rural areas. The implementation of WSN architecture in SMS needs an intelligent scheduling mechanism that efficiently handles the dynamic traffic load without sacrificing the energy efficiency of network. This paper presents a centralized TDMA scheduling based medium access control (MAC) protocol, called Energy Traffic Priority Scheduling MAC (ETPS-MAC) that accommodates variable traffic load while maintaining Quality-of-Service (QoS) assurance in hierarchical WSNs. The ETPS-MAC protocol employs priority scheduling algorithm which considers two factors for assigning priority, the energy factor and the traffic load factor to avoid packet buffering and maintains minimum data packet delay in case of high traffic load. Moreover, a novel rank-based clustering mechanism in FPS-QMAC protocol prolongs the network lifetime by minimizing the distance between the cluster head (CH) and the base station (BS). Both analytical and simulation models demonstrate the superiority of the ETPS-MAC protocol in terms of energy consumption, transmission delay, data throughput and message complexity when compared with the existing TDMA based MAC protocols.     

Medium access protocol design for delay-guaranteed multicode CDMA multimedia networks

To enable multimedia real-time applications over next-generation wireless code-division multiple access (CDMA) packet-switching networks, previous efforts show a proper scheduling policy is the key to provide delay-guaranteed access services to various traffic types with different bit error rate (BER) requirements. Considering the support of the prevailing Internet protocol (IP) with variable-length packets in future mobile networks, we develop a mathematically delay-optimal medium access control (MAC) protocol over multicode CDMA (MC-CDMA) environments under the continuous-time assumption. From our investigations, we suggest that a good MAC protocol should be designed by using a proper single-server scheduling policy to guarantee packet-delay, and controlling the maximal number of simultaneous spreading-code transmissions to maintain the required BER. We further evaluate the performance of some MC-CDMA MAC protocols supporting QoS on BER and packet-delay, and show that MAC schemes conforming to our design rules give better performance on packet-delay when maintaining acceptable BER of various traffic types.     

Battery-dynamics driven tdma mac protocols for wireless body-area monitoring networks in healthcare applications

We propose the cross-layer based battery-aware time division multiple access (TDMA) medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless body-area monitoring networks in wireless healthcare applications. By taking into account the joint effect of electrochemical properties of the battery, time-varying wireless fading channels, and packet queuing characteristics, our proposed schemes are designed to prolong the battery lifespan of the wireless sensor nodes while guaranteeing the reliable and timely message delivery, which is critically important for the patient monitoring networks. In addition, we develop a Markov chain model to analyze the performance of our proposed schemes. Both the obtained analytical and simulation results show that our proposed schemes can significantly increase the battery lifespan of sensor nodes while satisfying the reliability and delay-bound quality of service (QoS) requirements for wireless body-area monitoring networks. Furthermore, the case study of the electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring application shows that besides meeting the delay requirements, our proposed schemes outperform the IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth protocols in terms of battery lifespan.     

Passive cluster-based multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency and quality of service (QoS) are both essential issues in the applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) all along, which are mainly reflected in the development of routing and MAC protocols. However, there is little design for achieving the dual performances simultaneously. In this paper, we develop a practical passive cluster-based node-disjoint many to one multipath routing protocol to satisfy the requirements of energy efficiency and QoS in practical WSNs. Passive clustering approach is put to use in the first round, while active clustering technique is taken in the other rounds. Implementation of smart delay strategy makes the cluster distribute uniformly, as well as lessen the number of nodes that have taken part in routing. Among cluster heads, a node-disjoint many to one multipath routing discovery algorithm, which is composed of the optimal path searching process and multipath expansion process, is implemented to find multiple paths at the minimum cost. The simulation results show the proposed protocol achieved very good performance both in energy efficiency and QoS.     

Cluster Based Routing Protocol for Mobile Nodes in Wireless Sensor Network

Mobility of sensor nodes in wireless sensor network (WSN) has posed new challenges particularly in packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. Some real applications impose combined environments of fixed and mobile sensor nodes in the same network, while others demand a complete mobile sensors environment. Packet loss that occurs due to mobility of the sensor nodes is one of the main challenges which comes in parallel with energy consumption. In this paper, we use cross layer design between medium access control (MAC) and network layers to overcome these challenges. Thus, a cluster based routing protocol for mobile sensor nodes (CBR-Mobile) is proposed. The CBR-Mobile is mobility and traffic adaptive protocol. The timeslots assigned to the mobile sensor nodes that had moved out of the cluster or have not data to send will be reassigned to incoming sensor nodes within the cluster region. The protocol introduces two simple databases to achieve the mobility and traffic adaptively. The proposed protocol sends data to cluster heads in an efficient manner based on received signal strength. In CBR-Mobile protocol, cluster based routing collaborates with hybrid MAC protocol to support mobility of sensor nodes. Schedule timeslots are used to send the data message while the contention timeslots are used to send join registration messages. The performance of proposed CBR-Mobile protocol is evaluated using MATLAB and was observed that the proposed protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, delay and fairness in mobility environment compared to LEACH-Mobile and AODV protocols.     

Network selection in cognitive radio enabled Wireless Body Area Networks

In recent years, the great interest in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has been aroused significantly due to the advancement in wireless communications. In wireless communication, all WBAN nodes that monitor the human body's vital functions transfer information to a central sink node, which is directly connected to a Cognitive Radio enabled Controller called CRC. To transfer this information from a CRC to an e-health server, it requires long-range wireless networks, such as UMTS, LTE, WiMAX, WiFi, and satellite internet provider. It is challenging for a CRC to select the best networks for different WBAN data traffic, such as emergency mandatory, delay sensitive, and general monitoring. This paper proposes a scheme for selecting the best network from the available networks depending on the Quality of Service(QoS) requirements for different WBAN applications. Different multiple attribute decision-making algorithms are used in the proposed scheme. Numerical results and discussion reveal that the proposed scheme is effective in making a good network selection in situations where there is a conflict among different QoS requirements for different WBAN applications.     

Hybrid Unified-Slot Access Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) solution is an emerging new technology to resolve the small area connection issues around human body, especially for the medical applications. Based on the integrated superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.4, a modified medium access control (MAC) protocol, named Hybrid Unified-slot Access (HUA) protocol for WBANs is proposed with focus on the simplicity, dependability and power efficiency. Considering the support to multiple physical layer (PHY) technologies including ultra-wide band (UWB), the slotted ALOHA is employed in the contention access period (CAP) to request the slot allocation. Mini-slot method is designed to enhance the efficiency of the contention. Moreover, sufficient slot allocation in the contention-free period (CFP) makes HUA adaptive to the different traffic including the medical and non-medical applications. Simulation results show that the protocol effectively decreases the probability of collision in a CAP and extends the CFP slots to support more traffic with quality of service (QoS) guarantee.     

A Practical Traffic Scheduling Scheme for Differentiated Services of Healthcare Systems on Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have recently been extensively researched due to the flexibility and cost savings they provide. One of the most promising applications of sensor networks is human health monitoring: wireless sensors are placed on the human body to form a wireless body network where the sensor node can continuously monitor real-time physiological parameters or human activities (motion detection). However, along with the flexibility, many problems arise due to a number of factors, including the bad quality of transmission media and the scarcity of resources. Moreover, sensor networks have different characteristics such as a variety of devices, different generated data, etc. From a quality of service (QoS) point of view, the healthcare domain can be seen as a real-time application demand to consider application requirements. Healthcare domains principally have stringent delay and loss requirements. Thus, considering different capabilities and ensuring time data delivery become necessary. Because wireless body area networks (WBAN) deal with human life, any delayed or lost data can endanger the user’s life. This paper proposes a differentiated traffic and scheduling scheme for WBAN. It is based on patients’ data classification and prioritization according to their current status and diseases. Through queue scheduling and path choice issues, the urgent data are delivered on time to provide a QoS guarantee for WBAN. Finally, it is shown that the proposed scheme is efficient for timely data transfer in WBAN.     

GMCAR: Grid-based multipath with congestion avoidance routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Recently, the interest in wireless sensor networks has been magnetized in the delay sensitive applications such as real-time applications. These time critical applications crave certain QoS requirements as though end-to-end delay guarantee and network bandwidth reservation. However, the severe resource constraints of the wireless sensor networks pose great challenges that hinder supporting these requirements. In this paper, we propose a Grid-based Multipath with Congestion Avoidance Routing protocol (GMCAR) as an efficient QoS routing protocol that is suited for grided sensor networks. We employ the idea of dividing the sensor network field into grids. Inside each grid, one of the sensor nodes is selected as a master node which is responsible for delivering the data generated by any node in that grid and for routing the data received from other master nodes in the neighbor grids. For each master node, multiple diagonal paths that connect the master node to the sink are stored as routing entries in the routing table of that node. The novelty of the proposed protocol lies behind the idea of incorporating the grids densities along with the hop count into the routing decisions. A congestion control mechanism is proposed in order to relieve the congested areas in case of congestion occurrence. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol has the potential to achieve up to 19.5% energy saving, 24.7% reduction in the delay and up to 8.5% enhancement in the network throughput when compared to another QoS routing protocol. However, when compared to the basic grid-based coordinated routing protocol, it achieves 23% energy saving. In addition, the proposed protocol shows its superiority in achieving better utilization to the available storage.     

Perceptive admission control for wireless network quality of service

As wireless networks become more widely used, there is a growing need to support advanced services, such as multimedia streaming and voice over IP. Traditional approaches to guarantee quality of service (QoS) work well only with predictable channel and network access. In wireless mobile networks, where conditions dynamically change as nodes move about the network, a stateless, high level approach is required. Since shared wireless resources are easily over-utilized, the load in the network must be controlled so that an acceptable QoS for real-time applications can be maintained. If minimum real-time requirements are not met, these unusable packets waste scarce bandwidth and hinder other traffic, compounding the problem. To enable high QoS for all admitted traffic, we propose the Perceptive Admission Control (PAC) protocol. PAC monitors the wireless channel and dynamically adapts admission control decisions to enable high network utilization while preventing congestion. Through discussion, simulations and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that PAC ensures low packet loss and delay for all admitted flows.     

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.     

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

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

Analysis and optimization of duty-cycle in preamble-based random access networks

Duty-cycling has been proposed as an effective mechanism for reducing the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Asynchronous duty-cycle protocols where the receiver wakes up periodically to check whether there is a transmission and the sender transmits preambles to check if the receiver is awake are widely used in WSNs due to the elimination of complex control mechanisms for topology discovery and synchronization. However, the intrinsic simplicity of the asynchronous mechanism has the drawback of smaller energy saving potential that requires the optimization of the duty cycle parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the optimization of the duty-cycle parameters in preamble-based random access networks based on the accurate modeling of delay, reliability and energy consumption as a function of listen time, sleep time, traffic rate and medium access control (MAC) protocol parameters. The challenges for modeling are the random access MAC and the sleep policy of the receivers, which make it impossible to determine the exact time of data packet transmissions, and thus difficult to investigate the performance indicators given by the delay, reliability and energy consumption to successfully receive packets. An analysis of these indicators is developed as a function of the relevant parameters of the network and it is used in the minimization of the energy consumption subject to delay and reliability requirements. The optimization provides significant reduction of the energy consumption compared to the previously proposed protocols in the literature.