Saturation throughput analysis of multi‐rate IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

IEEE 802.11 protocol supports adaptive rate mechanism, which selects the transmission rate according to the condition of the wireless channel, to enhance the system performance. Thus, research of multi‐rate IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) performance has become one of the hot research topics. In this paper, we study the performance of multi‐rate IEEE 802.11 MAC over a Gaussian channel. An accurate analytical model is presented to compute the system saturation throughput. We validate our model in both single‐rate and multi‐rate networks through various simulations. The results show that our model is accurate and channel error has a significant impact on system performance. In addition, our numerical results show that the performance of single‐rate IEEE 802.11 DCF with basic access method is better than that with RTS/CTS mechanism in a high‐rate and high‐load network and vice versa. In a multi‐rate network, the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF with RTS/CTS mechanism is better than that with basic access method in a congested and error‐prone wireless environment. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Combining contention‐based access and dynamic service period allocation for performance improvement in IEEE 802.11ad mmWave WLAN

In IEEE 802.11ad millimeter wave wireless LANs, the directional multi‐giga bit stations (DMGSTAs) use contention‐based access periods (CBAPs) and scheduled service periods (SPs) for medium access. The STAs carrying non‐QoS traffic use CBAPs, while SPs are allocated for STAs carrying high QoS applications. During CBAP, the STAs use enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) scheme. Further, 802.11ad advocates dynamic allocation of SP for guaranteed data transmission based on a centralized polling scheme. The standard advocates that the coverage area around the access point can be divided into several sectors, and the total CBAP shall be divided among the sectors on a time sharing basis. The STAs residing within a sector simultaneously contend during the CBAP fraction of that sector. However, such STAs have to defer their transmission attempts and wait for the designated CBAP fraction of the succeeding beacon interval (BI), if the residual time in the current CBAP fraction is not sufficient for a frame transmission. This leads to very high delay and reduced throughput. The objective of this paper is to propose an efficient hybrid medium access control scheme, where the deferred STAs during CBAP are scheduled again by utilizing the unallocated slots in the SP of the same BI. We describe an analytical model for the throughput and the average frame delay, under the proposed scheme, and compare the performance against the legacy scheme, where the STAs use CBAP alone for channel access. The analytical and simulation results establish that the proposed scheme significantly improves the throughput and reduces the average frame delay.     

Cross‐layer perspective for channel assignment in cognitive radio networks: A survey

With the advent of various emerging wireless products, the usage of limited spectrum has grown exponentially in the recent years. In the next few years, that mobile data traffic globally is expected to grow up to 50 EB/month, which is nearly a five times increase over year 2018. Therefore, it will become extremely difficult to satisfy the ever increasing demand through the current fixed spectrum assignment policy in which spectrum band is exclusively used for the particular applications, and it has also led to underutilization of a significant portion of the spectrum (like TV bands). Cognitive radio networks has emerged as a possible solution for the problem which makes dynamic spectrum access possible for unlicensed user when licensed user is not active. Among various operations of cognitive radio, channel assignment to the unlicensed user is very important. Further, wireless regional area network is one of the most important application of cognitive radio, which provides wireless broadband to the rural area using vacant TV channels. This paper discusses channel assignment techniques considering various functionalities for cognitive radio networks in respect of wireless regional area network in the existing literature. Initially, a comprehensive introduction to both cognitive radio networks and wireless regional area networks is provided, and in the end, the paper summarizes the various issues and research challenges in the channel assignment for wireless regional area networks.     

An efficient MAC protocol for multi‐channel mobile ad hoc networks based on location information

This paper considers the channel assignment problem in a multi‐channel MANET environment. We propose a scheme called GRID, by which a mobile host can easily determine which channel to use based on its current location. In fact, following the GSM style, our GRID spends no communication cost to allocate channels to mobile hosts since channel assignment is purely determined by hosts' physical locations. We show that this can improve the channel reuse ratio. We then propose a multi‐channel MAC protocol, which integrates GRID. Our protocol is characterized by the following features: (i) it follows an ‘on‐demand’ style to access the medium and thus a mobile host will occupy a channel only when necessary, (ii) the number of channels required is independent of the network topology, and (iii) no form of clock synchronization is required. On the other hand, most existing protocols assign channels to a host statically even if it has no intention to transmit [IEEE/ACM Trans. Networks 1995; 3 (4):441–449; 1993; 1 (6): 668–677; IEEE J. Selected Areas Commun. 1999; 17 (8):1345–1352], require a number of channels which is a function of the maximum connectivity [IEEE/ACM Trans. Networks 1995; 3 (4):441–449; 1993; 1 (6): 668–677; Proceedings of IEEE MILCOM'97, November 1997; IEEE J. Selected Areas Commun. 1999; 17 (8):1345–1352], or necessitate a clock synchronization among all hosts in the MANET [IEEE J. Selected Areas Commun. 1999; 17 (8):1345–1352; Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'99, October 1999]. Through simulations, we demonstrate the advantages of our protocol. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Goodput and throughput comparison of single‐hop and multi‐hop routing for IEEE 802.11 DCF‐based wireless networks under hidden terminal existence

We investigate how multi‐hop routing affects the goodput and throughput performances of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function‐based wireless networks compared with direct transmission (single hopping), when medium access control dynamics such as carrier sensing, collisions, retransmissions, and exponential backoff are taken into account under hidden terminal presence. We propose a semi‐Markov chain‐based goodput and throughput model for IEEE 802.11‐based wireless networks, which works accurately with both multi‐hopping and single hopping for different network topologies and over a large range of traffic loads. Results show that, under light traffic, there is little benefit of parallel transmissions and both single‐hop and multi‐hop routing achieve the same end‐to‐end goodput. Under moderate traffic, concurrent transmissions are favorable as multi‐hopping improves the goodput up to 730% with respect to single hopping for dense networks. At heavy traffic, multi‐hopping becomes unstable because of increased packet collisions and network congestion, and single‐hopping achieves higher network layer goodput compared with multi‐hop routing. As for the link layer throughput is concerned, multi‐hopping increases throughput 75 times for large networks, whereas single hopping may become advantageous for small networks. The results point out that the end‐to‐end goodput can be improved by adaptively switching between single hopping and multi‐hopping according to the traffic load and topology. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks in industry 4.0: Exploring requirements,protocols, and challenges—A MAC survey

The vision to connect everyday physical objects to the Internet promises to create the Internet of Things (IoT), which is expected to integrate the diverse technologies such as sensors, actuators, radio frequency identification, communication technologies, and Internet protocols. Thus, IoT promises to transfer traditional industry to advance digital industry known as the Industry 4.0. At the core of the Industry 4.0 are the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) that led to the development of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) and industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks (IWSANs). These networks play a central role of connecting machines, parts, products, and humans and create a diverse set of new applications to support intelligent and autonomous decision making. The IWSAN is a promising technology for numerous industrial applications because of their several potential benefits such as simple deployment, low cost, less complexity, and mobility support. However, despite such benefits, they impose several unique challenges at different layers of the protocol stack when deploying them for various monitoring and control applications in the Industry 4.0. In this article, we explore IWSAN, its applications, requirements, challenges, and solutions in the context of industrial control applications. Our main focus is on the medium access control (MAC) layer that can be exploited to satisfy such requirements. Our discussion presents extensive background study of the MAC schemes and it reviews the MAC protocols of the existing wireless standards and technologies. A number of application‐specific MAC protocols developed to support industrial applications, which are not part of these standards, are also elaborated. We rationalize to what extent the existing standards and protocols help in solving such requirements as laid down by the Industry 4.0. In the end, we emphasize on existing challenges and present important future directions.     

Modeling and performance analysis of VI‐CRA: A congestion control algorithm for vehicular networks

This study proposes a Vehicle ID‐based CAM Rate Adaptation (VI‐CRA) algorithm for beacon messages in the vehicular network. Foremost, an improved vehicle ID–based analytical model is proposed at the MAC layer of vehicular network. The model weighs the random back‐off number chosen by vehicles participating in the back‐off process, with the vehicle ID incorporated in their respective CAMs. This eventually leads to the selection of a vehicle ID–based random back‐off number, minimizing the probability of collision due to same back‐off number selection. It is worth noting that the improved analytical model outperforms the existing works in terms of average packet delay since only one fourth of the contention window size is used throughout the simulation. To enhance the performance of the analytical model, the paper incorporates a congestion control algorithm, by adapting the rate of CAM broadcast over the control channel. The algorithm is designed considering a wide range of scenarios, ranging from nonsaturated to extremely saturated network (in terms of collision probability) and sparsely distributed to teemed network (in terms of vehicular density). For better analyses of simulation results, the algorithm is applied over different vehicle ID–based back‐off numbers. Simulation results for all the back‐off numbers show that vehicle ID–based CAM rate adaptation algorithm performs better than the traditional fixed CAM rate IEEE 802.11p, even at high vehicular density.     

Multi‐carrier platform for wireless communications. Part 1: High‐performance,high‐throughput TDMA and DS‐CDMA via multi‐carrier implementations

Multi‐carrier technologies in general, and OFDM and MC‐CDMA in particular, are quickly becoming an integral part of the wireless landscape. In this first of a two‐part survey, the authors present the innovative transmit/receive multi‐carrier implementation of TDMA and DS‐CDMA systems. Specifically, at the transmit side, the pulse shape (in TDMA) and the chip shape (in DS‐CDMA) corresponds to a linear combining of in‐phase harmonics (called a CI signal). At the receiver side, traditional time‐domain processing (equalization in TDMA and RAKE reception in DS‐CDMA) is replaced by innovative frequency based processing. Here, receivers decompose pulse (or chip) shapes into carrier subcomponents and recombine these in a manner achieving both high frequency diversity gain and low MAI. The resulting system outperforms traditional TDMA and DS‐CDMA systems by 10–14 dB at typical BERs, and, by application of pseudo‐orthogonal pulse shapes (chip shapes), is able to double system throughput while maintaining performance gains of up to 8 dB. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multi‐carrier platform for wireless communications. Part 2: OFDM and MC‐CDMA systems with high‐performance,high‐throughput via innovations in spreading

Multi‐carrier technologies in general, and OFDM and MC‐CDMA in particular, are an integral part of the wireless landscape. In this second part of a two‐part survey, the authors present an innovative set of spreading codes known as CI codes, and demonstrate how these significantly increase performance and capacity in OFDM and MC‐CDMA systems, all the while eliminating PAPR concerns. Regarding OFDM: the spreading of each symbol over all N carriers using CI spreading codes (replacing the current one symbol per carrier strategy) are presented. CI codes are ideally suited for spreading OFDM since, when compared to traditional OFDM, CI‐based OFDM systems achieve the performance of coded OFDM (COFDM) while maintaining the throughput of uncoded OFDM, and, at the same time, eliminate PAPR concerns. When applied to MC‐CDMA, CI codes provide a simple means of supporting 2N users on N carriers while maintaining the performance of an N‐user Hadamard Walsh code MC‐CDMA system, i.e., CI codes double MC‐CDMA network capacity without loss in performance. The CI codes used in OFDM and MC‐CDMA systems are directly related to the CI pulse (chip) shapes used to enhance TDMA and DS‐CDMA (see part 1): hence, the CI approach provides a common hardware platform for today's multi‐carrier/multiple‐access technologies, enabling software radio applications. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.