Improving Spatial Reuse in Multihop Wireless Networks - A Survey

In multihop wireless ad-hoc networks, the medium access control (MAC) protocol plays a key role in coordinating the access to the shared medium among wireless nodes. Currently, the distributed coordination function (DCF) of the IEEE 802.11 is the dominant MAC protocol for both wireless LANs and wireless multihop ad hoc environment due to its simple implementation and distributed nature. The current access method of the IEEE 802.11 does not make efficient use of the shared channel due to its conservative approach in assessing the level of interference; this in turn affects the spatial reuse of the limited radio resources and highly affect the achieved throughput of a multihop wireless network. This paper surveys various methods that have been proposed in order to enhance the channel utilization by improving the spatial reuse.     

Queuing Scheme for Improved Downlink Throughput on WLANs

A transmission queuing scheme is described that increases downlink throughput on wireless local area networks (WLANs) while also increasing the total throughput. When the amount of uplink traffic increases on a WLAN, the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol, which is the prescribed scheme for IEEE 802.11 WLAN channel access, may substantially reduce the rate of downlink data frame transmission. This results in severe throughput degradation for mobile stations with downlink traffic. The proposed scheme comprises a transmission control function based on consecutive transmission, as described in the IEEE 802.11e standard, and a dynamic queue prioritization algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme increases the maximum total throughput for uplink and downlink traffic by 17% compared with the conventional distributed coordination function (DCF) scheme and that it reduces the difference between uplink and downlink throughput. In an environment where transmission errors occur, the difference in throughput is reduced by about 50% compared with the conventional schemes.     

基于协议序列平均分配算法的VANET信道接入机制

为了提高VANET中节点的吞吐量性能,提出基于协议序列平均分配算法的信道接入机制。在高速公路场景下,规划IEEE 802.11p业务信道与竞争区段的映射,并根据用户保障序列的特性设计帧结构。通过少量反馈确定竞争区段的节点数,并提出循环轮流分配法实现平均意义上非整数个序列的分配。仿真结果证明了理论分析的有效性,在实际路况中均分法与经典方法相比吞吐量性能明显改善,并且节点越稀疏、物理层数据传输速率越高,吞吐量性能提升越明显,同时可保持较低的网络开销和较好的信道接入公平性。     

Towards providing optimal energy‐efficiency and throughput for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless network standard has become one of the most used wireless networking technologies for smart devices as it offers mobility support and low cost deployment. However, these devices deeply rely on the energy provided by their batteries, which results in limited running time. IEEE 802.11 network standard provides stations with carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance for the medium access. Yet it results in stations to consume an important amount of power. Therefore, minimizing WiFi‐based energy consumption in smart devices has been received substantial attention in both academia and industry. Accordingly, this paper * proposes a novel beacon‐based energy‐efficient collision‐free medium access control protocol for any type of IEEE 802.11 stations, regardless of being stationary or mobile, or having different amount of traffic flow, transmission rates, or traffic types. The proposed scheme is valid for all types of low or wide bandwidth, single or multiuser multiple‐input multiple‐output WLAN channels, such as IEEE 802.11a\b\g\n\ac. In the proposed scheme, energy saving is achieved, enabling stations to transmit on the right time and maintaining stations in the doze state during a predetermined sleep_time interval after each successful frame transmission, by making use of modified control and management frames of the standard IEEE 802.11 protocol. The proposed scheme reduces the probability of collisions and may allow stations to enter the collision‐free state, regardless of the number of stations on the channel and their traffic types. Widespread simulations have been executed to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly increases overall throughput and reduces power consumption of stations over IEEE 802.11 WLANs.     

Model-based admission control for IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access

IEEE 802.11e enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) is a distributed medium access scheme based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. In this paper, a model-based admission control (MBAC) scheme that performs real-timely at medium access control (MAC) layer is proposed for the decision of accepting or rejecting requests for adding traffic streams to an IEEE 802.11e EDCA wireless local area network (WLAN). The admission control strategy is implemented in access point (AP), which employs collision probability and access delay measures from active flows to estimate throughput and packet delay of each traffic class by the proposed unsaturation analytical model. Simulation results prove accuracy of the proposed analytical model and effectiveness of MBAC scheme.     

A hybrid multi-channel MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

In a regular wireless ad hoc network, the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol coordinates channel access among nodes, and the throughput of the network is limited by the bandwidth of a single channel. The multi-channel MAC protocols can exploit multiple channels to achieve high network throughput by enabling more concurrent transmissions. In this paper, we propose a hybrid and adaptive protocol, called H-MMAC, which utilizes multi-channel resources more efficiently than other multi-channel MAC protocols. The main idea is to adopt the IEEE 802.11 Power Saving Mechanism and to allow nodes to transmit data packets while other nodes try to negotiate the data channel during the Ad hoc Traffic Indication Message window based on the network traffic load. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed H-MMAC protocol improves the network performance significantly in terms of the aggregate throughput, average delay, fairness and energy efficiency.     

Modeling of Collision Avoidance Protocols in Single-Channel Multihop Wireless Networks

Although there has been considerable work on the performance evaluation of collision avoidance schemes, most analytical work is confined to single-hop ad hoc networks or networks with very few hidden terminals. We present the first analytical model to derive the saturation throughput of collision avoidance protocols in multi-hop ad hoc networks with nodes randomly placed according to a two-dimensional Poisson distribution. We show that the sender-initiated collision-avoidance scheme achieves much higher throughput than the ideal carrier sense multiple access scheme with a separate channel for acknowledgments. More importantly, we show that the collision-avoidance scheme can accommodate much fewer competing nodes within a region in a network infested with hidden terminals than in a fully-connected network, if reasonable throughput is to be maintained. Simulations of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol and one of its variants validate the predictions made in the analysis. It is also shown that the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol cannot ensure collision-free transmission of data packets and thus throughput can degrade well below what is predicted by the analysis of a correct collision avoidance protocol. Based on these results, a number of improvements are proposed for the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol.     

Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11ah wireless local area network under the restricted access window‐based mechanism

IEEE 802.11ah is an approved amendment to IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) standard to support growing demand for machine‐to‐machine (M2M) applications. To enable an efficient scheme for accessing the channel by a large number of stations (STAs) within the coverage of an access point, 802.11ah has developed a novel mechanism known as Restrictred Access Window (RAW). Here, a group of STAs attempts channel access during their designated RAW slot by following the carrier sense multiple access‐collission avoidance (CSMA‐CA)‐based enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) mechanism. In this paper, we develop an analytical model for finding the nonsaturation/saturation throughput of 802.11ah WLAN under the RAW‐based channel access mechanism. We describe an analytical model for finding the average frame delay as well. The impact of the number of STAs and number of groups on network throughput and average delay are presented. We establish that the RAW mechanism can improve the throughput while the average frame delay gets reduced. The analytical results are validated by extensive simulation studies.     

OAR: An Opportunistic Auto-Rate Media Access Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

The IEEE 802.11 wireless media access standard supports multiple data rates at the physical layer. Moreover, various auto rate adaptation mechanisms at the medium access layer have been proposed to utilize this multi-rate capability by automatically adapting the transmission rate to best match the channel conditions. In this paper, we introduce the Opportunistic Auto Rate (OAR) protocol to better exploit durations of high-quality channels conditions. The key mechanism of the OAR protocol is to opportunistically send multiple back-to-back data packets whenever the channel quality is good. As channel coherence times typically exceed multiple packet transmission times for both mobile and non-mobile users, OAR achieves significant throughput gains as compared to state-of-the-art auto-rate adaptation mechanisms. Moreover, over longer time scales, OAR ensures that all nodes are granted channel access for the same time-shares as achieved by single-rate IEEE 802.11. We describe mechanisms to implement OAR on top of any existing auto-rate adaptation scheme in a nearly IEEE 802.11 compliant manner. We also analytically study OAR and characterize the delay jitter and the gains in throughput as a function of the channel conditions. Finally, we perform an extensive set of ns-2 simulations to study the impact of such factors as node velocity, channel conditions, and topology on the throughput of OAR.     

Distributed cooperative MAC for multihop wireless networks

This article investigates distributed cooperative medium access control protocol design for multihop wireless networks. Cooperative communication has been proposed recently as an effective way to mitigate channel impairments. With cooperation, single-antenna mobile terminals in a multi-user environment share antennas from other mobiles to generate a virtual multipleantenna system that achieves more reliable communication with a higher diversity gain. However, more mobiles conscribed for one communication inevitably induces complex medium access interactions, especially in multihop wireless ad hoc networks. To improve the network throughput and diversity gain simultaneously, we investigate the issues and challenges in designing an efficient MAC scheme for such networks. Furthermore, based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF, a cross-layer designed cooperative MAC protocol is proposed. The MAC scheme adapts to the channel condition and payload length.     

Design and performance analysis on adaptive reservation-assisted collision resolution protocol for WLANs

In conventional IEEE 802.11 medium access control protocol, the distributed coordination function is designed for the wireless stations (WSs) to perform channel contention within the wireless local area networks (WLANs). Packet collision is considered one of the major issues within this type of contention-based scheme, which can severely degrade network performance for the WLANs. Research work has been conducted to modify the random backoff mechanism in order to alleviate the packet collision problem while the WSs are contending for channel access. However, most of the existing work can only provide limited throughput enhancement under specific number of WSs within the network. In this paper, an adaptive reservation-assisted collision resolution (ARCR) protocol is proposed to improve packet collision resulting from the random access schemes. With its adaptable reservation period, the contention-based channel access can be adaptively transformed into a reservation-based system if there are pending packets required to be transmitted between the WSs and the access point. Analytical model is derived for the proposed ARCR scheme in order to evaluate and validate its throughput performance. It can be observed from both analytical and simulation results that the proposed protocol outperforms existing schemes with enhanced channel utilization and network throughput.     

DCMA: A Label Switching MAC for Efficient Packet Forwarding in Multihop Wireless Networks

This paper addresses the problem of efficient packet forwarding in a multihop, wireless "mesh" network. We present an efficient interface contained forwarding (ICF) architecture for a "wireless router," i.e., a forwarding node with a single wireless network interface card (NIC) in a multihop wireless network that allows a packet to be forwarded entirely within the NIC of the forwarding node without requiring per-packet intervention by the node's CPU. To effectively forward packets in a pipelined fashion without incurring the 802.11-related overheads of multiple independent channel accesses, we specify a slightly modified version of the 802.11 MAC, called data driven cut-through multiple access (DCMA) that uses multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-like labels in the control packets, in conjunction with a combined ACK/RTS packet, to reduce 802.11 channel access latencies. Our proposed technique can be used in combination with "frame bursting" as specified by the IEEE 802.11e standard to provide an end-to-end cut-through channel access. Using extensive simulations, we compare the performance of DCMA with 802.11 DCF MAC with respect to throughput and latency and suggest a suitable operating region to get maximum benefits using our mechanism as compared to 802.11     

Exploiting the channel using uninterrupted collision‐free MAC adaptation over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) have reached an important stage and become a common technology for wireless access due to its low cost, ease of deployment, and mobility support. In parallel with the extensive growth of WLANs, the development of an efficient medium access control protocol that provides both high throughput performance for data traffic and quality of service support for real‐time applications has become a major focus in WLAN research. The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Functions (DCF/EDCA) provide contention‐based distributed channel access mechanisms for stations to share the wireless medium. However, performance of these mechanisms may drop dramatically because of high collision probabilities as the number of active stations increases. In this paper, we propose an adaptive collision‐free MAC adaptation. The proposed scheme prevents collisions and allows stations to enter the collision‐free state regardless of the traffic load (saturated or unsaturated) and the number of stations on the medium. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme dramatically enhances the overall throughput and supports quality of service for real‐time services over 802.11‐based WLANs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Busy tone contention protocol: a new high‐throughput and energy‐efficient wireless local area network medium access control protocol using busy tone

Design of an efficient wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol is a challenging task due to the time‐varying characteristics of wireless communication channel and different delay requirements in diverse applications. To support variable number of active stations and varying network load conditions, random access MAC protocols are employed. Existing wireless local area network (WLAN) protocol (IEEE 802.11) is found to be inefficient at high data rates because of the overhead associated with the contention resolution mechanism employed. The new amendments of IEEE 802.11 that support multimedia traffic (IEEE 802.11e) are at the expense of reduced data traffic network efficiency. In this paper, we propose a random access MAC protocol called busy tone contention protocol (BTCP) that uses out‐of‐band signals for contention resolution in WLANs. A few variants of this protocol are also proposed to meet the challenges in WLAN environments and application requirements. The proposed BTCP isolate multimedia traffics from background data transmissions and gives high throughput irrespective of the number of contending stations in the network. As a result, in BTCP, admission control of multimedia flows becomes simple and well defined. Studies of the protocol, both analytically and through simulations under various network conditions, have shown to give better performance in comparison with the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Extended sliding frame R-Aloha: Medium access control (MAC) protocol for mobile networks

Proliferation of mobile communication devices necessitates a reliable and efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this paper, A MAC protocol, called extended sliding frame reservation Aloha (ESFRA), based on sliding frame R-Aloha (SFRA) is proposed for network access technique. ESFRA is particularly designed to solve the mobile hidden station (MHS) problem in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) by including relative locations of transmitting stations in the packet frame information header. The MHS problem is unique in mobile networks and occurs if a mobile station enters in a collision free zone of any ongoing communication and disturbs this communication with its transmission. In addition to the MHS problem, ESFRA simultaneously solves hidden station, exposed station, and neighborhood capture problems typically observed in wireless networks. A Markov model of ESFRA is developed and provided here to estimate throughput, delay and collision probabilities of the proposed protocol. The Markov modeling is extended to the analysis of SFRA and IEEE 802.11 to compare these competing MAC protocols with ESFRA. The analysis shows that ESFRA decreases frame transmission delay, increases throughput, and reduces collision probabilities compared to IEEE 802.11 and SFRA. ESFRA improves the network throughput 28 percent compared to that of IEEE 802.11, and 33 percent compared to that of SFRA. The improved performance is obtained at the expense of the synchronization compared to IEEE 802.11, but there is virtually no extra cost compared to SFRA.     

Throughput analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled MAC protocol in the presence of hidden nodes

The presence of hidden nodes degrades the performance of wireless networks due to an excessive amount of data frame collisions. The IEEE 802.15.4 medium access control (MAC) protocol, which is widely used in current wireless sensor networks, does not provide any hidden node avoidance mechanisms and consequently could lead to severe performance degradation in networks with hidden nodes. This paper presents a simple technique based on discrete-time Markov chain analysis to approximate the throughput of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol in the presence of hidden nodes. Using different network configurations, we validate the applicability of the proposed analysis for generic star-topology networks. Based on the analysis, the effects of network size, topology, frame length and frame arrival rate on the throughput of the system are investigated.     

Efficient Protocols Design and Performance Analysis for Centralized WLAN

Device-to-device communications have attracted much more attention recently in the realization of smart cities. In this paper, we propose a network coding (NC) scheme based on device-to-device communication for centralized wireless local area network (WLAN). In centralized WLAN scenarios, users’ communication can be implemented through multiple interaction of access points acted as relay nodes, which are similar to direct link session (DLS) protocol in IEEE 802.11 standard and we named the proposed protocol as advanced DLS scheme, where analytical performance results of the proposed two-way communication system using NC, with and without AP selection, are obtained in multi-AP cases, as well as the asymptotic results in high transmitting power. In addition, the performance comparisons of throughput, delay and collision probability of proposed scheme with IEEE 802.11 are provided in simulation, which present the advantages of centralized WLAN. By the analysis, it is found that the proposed advanced DLS scheme can achieve almost exactly the same bit error ratio performance as the optimal selection at all signal to noise ratio ranges. It is also shown that the proposed transmission scheme significantly outperform the current mode in two-way communication Nakagami channels owing to the diversity order and array gains. The proposed scheme only need little frame modification and can be compatible with the current standard. Finally, simulation results validate the theoretical analysis.     

基于IEEE 802.11高速无线局域网的速率自适应MAC协议研究

目前的IEEE 802.11标准在物理层提供了对多种发送速率的支持,然而在MAC层却没有规定速率自适应的方法。该文研究了高速IEEE 802.11 无线局域网中的速率自适应方案。首先,提出了EACK协议,EACK使用基本速率发送MAC头,并在ACK帧中携带信道信息,因而能够较快速地响应信道的变化,同时具有少的开销;其次,在EACK基础上,提出了一种恒定发送时间(CEACK)的策略,CEACK能够克服传统IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC协议的理论吞吐量上限,并且具有更好的时间公平性能,能够应用于高速的无线局域网。     

MCCA: a high-throughput MAC strategy for next-generation WLANs [medium access control protocols for wireless LANs]

Wireless LAN technology has been shown to he a revolutionary development during the last decade. Recently popularized IEEE 802.11a/g-based products can support up to 54 Mb/s physical layer rate and provide wireless access to the Internet. However, in order to deal robustly with the unreliable wireless nature, the 802.11 medium access control protocol has a relatively large overhead and hence, the throughput performance is much worse than the underlying physical layer rate. Moreover, along with many emerging applications and services over WLANs, such as voice over WLAN and audio/video streaming, the demand lor faster and higher- capacity WLANs has been growing recently. In this article, we propose a new medium access control protocol for the next-generation high-speed WLANs. The proposed medium access control, called multi-user polling controlled channel access, is composed of two components: multi-layer frame aggregation, which performs aggregation at both the medium access control and the physical layers; and multi-user polling, used to reduce the contention overhead and in turn, achieve higher network utilization. Multi-user polling controlled channel access is compared with the 802.11e-enhanced distributed channel access medium access control. Highly enhanced medium access control efficiency can be achieved by applying multi-user polling controlled channel access. We show the improved medium access control performance in terms of the aggregate throughput of non-QoS Hows with relevant QoS requirements.