TCP with delayed ack for wireless networks

This paper studies the TCP performance with delayed ack in wireless networks (including ad hoc and WLANs) which use IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol as the underlying medium access control. Our analysis and simulations show that TCP throughput does not always benefit from an unrestricted delay policy. In fact, for a given topology and flow pattern, there exists an optimal delay window size at the receiver that produces best TCP throughput. If the window is set too small, the receiver generates too many acks and causes channel contention; on the other hand, if the window is set too high, the bursty transmission at the sender triggered by large cumulative acks will induce interference and packet losses, thus degrading the throughout. In wireless networks, packet losses are also related to the length of TCP path; when traveling through a longer path, a packet is more likely to suffer interference. Therefore, path length is an important factor to consider when choosing appropriate delay window sizes. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive delayed ack mechanism which is suitable for ad hoc networks, then we propose a more general adaptive delayed ack scheme for ad hoc and hybrid networks. The simulation results show that our schemes can effectively improve TCP throughput by up to 25% in static networks, and provide more significant gain in mobile networks. The proposed schemes are simple and easy to deploy. The real testbed experiments are also presented to verify our approaches. Furthermore, a simple and effective receiver-side probe and detection is proposed to improve friendliness between the standard TCP and our proposed TCP with adaptive delayed ack.     

无线Ad Hoc网络中基于业务感知的多信道MAC协议(英文)

Existing multi-channel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols have been demonstrated to significantly increase wireless network performance compared to single channel MAC protocols. Traditionally, the channelization structure in IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks is pre-configured, and the entire available spectrum is divided into subchannels and equal channel widths. In contrast, this paper presents a Traffic-Aware Channelization MAC (TAC-MAC) protocol for wireless ad hoc networks, where each node is equipped with a single half duplex transceiver. TAC-MAC works in a distributed, fine-grai-ned manner, which dynamically divides variable-width subchannels and allocates subchannel width based on the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technique according to the traffic demands of nodes. Simulations show that the TAC-MAC can significantly improve network throughput and reduce packet delay compared with both fixed-width multi-channel MAC and single channel 802.11 protocols, which illustrates a new paradigm for high-efficient multi-channel MAC design in wireless ad hoc networks.     

Cross-layer TCP with bitmap error recovery scheme in wireless ad hoc networks

Current TCP is not able to distinguish corruption losses from packet loss events. Hence, high transmission errors and varying inherent latency within a wireless network would cause seriously adverse effects to TCP performance. To improve TCP in IEEE 802.11 multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks, this study proposes an error recovery mechanism based on coordination of TCP and IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols. The simulation results confirm that the proposed error recovery approach could provide a more efficient solution for frequent transmission losses, and enable TCP to distinguish between congestion errors and transmission errors, and thus, to respond with proper remedial actions.     

基于干扰图的无线自组织网络MAC协议

由于IEEE802．11MAC协议采用了简单的干扰模型，因此产生了隐藏终端和暴露终端这两个严重影响无线自组织网络性能的问题。文章提出了一种新的基于干扰图（Conflict Graph）的MAC协议——CG-MAC来提高无线自组织网络的吞吐量。通过仿真实验，该协议能够同时解决隐藏终端和暴露终端问题．很大程度地提高了网络性能。     

Design and performance of an enhanced IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol for multihop coverage extension

Ad hoc communication is gaining popularity, not only for pure ad hoc communication networks but also as a viable solution for coverage extension in wireless networks. Especially for upcoming WLAN hotspots, this is an interesting option to decrease installation costs. In this article we introduce a new MAC protocol that needs only marginal changes to the standard and enables efficient multihop networking. We advocate the use of multiple IEEE 802.11 channels, where one channel is reserved as a common signalling channel for the task of assigning the others (data channels) among wireless terminals. The proposed MAC protocols are based on a four-way handshake over the common signalling channel, while data transmission occurs on a dedicated channel. We propose a further optimization applying multiple wireless network interface cards. This improvement in performance comes at the price of a slightly more complex hardware. Two different simulation models are implemented to investigate our approach. The first model investigates the MAC protocol and its improvements, while the second model analyzes the multihop performance in terms of delivery ratio and transmission delay. BY means of numerous simulations we present the performance of our MAC approach in comparison with two standard approaches in terms of bandwidth, packet delivery, and transmission delay. For our performance evaluation we apply the IEEE 802.11a technology, but we note that our approach can also be used for IEEE 802.11b.     

Novel Fastest Retransmission and Rate Control Schemes for Improving TCP Performance in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

A number of different authors have considered the problem of performance degradation of transmission control protocol (TCP) in wireless ad hoc networks. We herein show that pauses in packet transmission due to packet losses are the fundamental cause of performance degradation of TCP in wireless ad hoc networks. To minimize the duration of packet transmission pauses, we propose a fast retransmission scheme for improving TCP performance in consideration of the inter-operability of previously deployed TCPs in wireless ad hoc networks. We also propose an additional rate control scheme for TCPs to reduce the probability of packet contention. Using OPNET and NS2 simulations, we show that our proposed schemes can provide a much better performance than conventional TCPs.     

Improving Transport Layer Performance in Multihop Ad Hoc Networks by Exploiting MAC Layer Information

The traditional TCP congestion control mechanism encounters a number of new problems and suffers a poor performance when the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used in multihop ad hoc networks. Many of the problems result from medium contention at the MAC layer. In this paper, we first illustrate that severe medium contention and congestion are intimately coupled, and TCP's congestion control algorithm becomes too coarse in its granularity, causing throughput instability and excessively long delay. Further, we illustrate TCP's severe unfairness problem due to the medium contention and the tradeoff between aggregate throughput and fairness. Then, based on the novel use of channel busyness ratio, a more accurate metric to characterize the network utilization and congestion status, we propose a new wireless congestion control protocol (WCCP) to efficiently and fairly support the transport service in multihop ad hoc networks. In this protocol, each forwarding node along a traffic flow exercises the inter-node and intra-node fair resource allocation and determines the MAC layer feedback accordingly. The end-to-end feedback, which is ultimately determined by the bottleneck node along the flow, is carried back to the source to control its sending rate. Extensive simulations show that WCCP significantly outperforms traditional TCP in terms of channel utilization, delay, and fairness, and eliminates the starvation problem     

Ad Hoc网络基于TCP吞吐量的速率自适应技术

目前的IEEE 802.11标准在物理层支持多速率传输,但在媒体接入控制(MAC,Media AccessControl)层却没有相应的速率自适应方法。针对目前Ad Hoc网络自适应速率控制方法的不足和在无线通信环境下TCP性能会大幅度恶化,提出了一种改进的MAC层速率自适应协议,该协议实现简单,与传统标准兼容性好,在提高TCP吞吐量的基础上能适应快速变化的无线信道,且能实现分段数据包的速率自适应传输。仿真结果表明,该协议比RBAR协议有更好的吞吐量。     

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.     

无线Ad hoc网络速率自适应MAC协议研究

无线Ad hoc网络多采用IEEE802.11系列标准,在物理层为数据传输提供了多速率能力。为了充分利用多速率能力提高系统的吞吐量,速率自适应MAC协议根据对当前信道质量的估计,选择最佳的数据传输速率。在分析了速率自适应MAC协议的基本工作过程之后,重点综述了目前存在的速率自适应MAC协议,并讨论了进一步研究的方向。     

Analytical modeling of bidirectional multi‐channel IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols

This paper presents an analytical approach to model the bi‐directional multi‐channel IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols (Bi‐MCMAC) for ad hoc networks. Extensive simulation work has been done for the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocols. Since simulation has several limitations, this work is primarily based on the analytical approach. The objective of this paper is to show analytically the performance advantages of Bi‐MCMAC protocol over the classical IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The distributed coordination function (DCF) mode of medium access control (MAC) is considered in the modeling. Two different channel scheduling strategies, namely, random channel selection and fastest channel first selection strategy are also presented in the presence of multiple channels with different transmission rates. M/G/1 queue is used to model the protocols, and stochastic reward nets (SRNs) are employed as a modeling technique as it readily captures the synchronization between events in the DCF mode of access. The average system throughput, mean delay, and server utilization of each MAC protocol are evaluated using the SRN formalism. We also validate our analytical model by comparison with simulation results. The results obtained through the analytical modeling approach illustrate the performance advantages of Bi‐MCMAC protocols with the fastest channel first scheduling strategy over the classical IEEE 802.11 protocol for TCP traffic in wireless ad hoc networks. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

TCP performance over mobile ad hoc networks: a quantitative study

In this paper, we study the performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP) over mobile ad‐hoc networks. We present a comprehensive set of simulation results and identify the key factors that impact TCP's performance over ad‐hoc networks. We use a variety of parameters including link failure detection latency, route computation latency, packet level route unavailability index, and flow level route unavailability index to capture the impact of mobility. We relate the impact of mobility on the different parameters to TCP's performance by studying the throughput, loss‐rate and retransmission timeout values at the TCP layer. We conclude from our results that existing approaches to improve TCP performance over mobile ad‐hoc networks have identified and hence focused only on a subset of the affecting factors. In the process, we identify a comprehensive set of factors influencing TCP performance. Finally, using the insights gained through the performance evaluations, we propose a framework called Atra consisting of three simple and easily implementable mechanisms at the MAC and routing layers to improve TCP's performance over ad‐hoc networks. We demonstrate that Atra improves on the throughput performance of a default protocol stack by 50%–100%. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal MAC packet size in networks without cut-through routing

This paper presents an analytical method of optimal breaking of a transmission control protocol (TCP)/Internet protocol (IP) message into medium access control (MAC) packets in networks without cut-through routing (such as networks compliant with the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network standard). The method accounts for the transmission delay of acknowledgement frames, the sliding window flow control in TCP/IP protocol, error control via retransmissions, and heterogeneity of transport parameters (link-to-link and upstream-downstream) along a multihop network path. Mathematically, the problem consists in minimizing the TCP/IP message transaction time, a nonlinear function of the MAC packet size, in the presence of a set of linear restrictions. Throughput calculations illustrating this method are performed using IEEE 802.11 data.     

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.     

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.     

A Store-and-Forward Cooperative MAC for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperative communications are widely used to increase the throughput of wireless networks. It is important to select the appropriate relay nodes to enhance the performance of cooperative communications. In wireless ad hoc networks, such as IEEE802.11 WLAN, the distributed MAC is used to share the wireless channel to different nodes. In this work, a simple store-and-forward cooperative MAC (SFC-MAC) is proposed, which is fully compatible with IEEE 802.11 MAC. In SSF-MAC, the relay node just stores the packets received from the sender and forward them to the receiver after it successfully contend the channel. Furthermore, an model is built to analyze the performance of relay methods in the ideal channel and imperfect channel. We utilize throughput performance as a metric to determine whether a relay node is selected. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed simple SSF-MAC can increase the system throughput.     

无线自组织网中VoIP性能研究

目前,VoIP技术及其业务迅速发展,在无线自组织网络中有广泛的应用,有必要对于VoIP在无线自组网中的传输进行分析研究。利用NS-2作为仿真工具对G.711编码标准下多跳无线自组织网中VoIP的传输进行仿真,使用802.11MAC层协议和AODV路由层协议。实验结果表明,无线自组织网络环境下VoIP系统性能(包括丢包率、时延等)受到多跳影响。     

一种自组网功率控制算法及分析

无线自组网中的移动节点大多依靠电池提供能量,因此能量是影响无线自组网性能的一个很大的瓶颈,作为事实上的无线自组网媒体接入协议,802.11并没有动态调整传输功率的能力,大大限制了网络的生存时间。采用功率控制可以提高节点的功率使用效率,减少相邻节点间的干扰,改善网络的性能。在802.11基础上提出一种基于信噪比的动态传输功率控制算法。通过进行计算机仿真,与802.11协议相比,在保持吞吐量性能的前提下,大大减少了节点的功率消耗,提高了节点的能量利用率。     

POWMAC: a single-channel power-control protocol for throughput enhancement in wireless ad hoc networks

Transmission power control (TPC) has great potential to increase the throughput of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Existing TPC schemes achieve this goal by using additional hardware (e.g., multiple transceivers), by compromising the collision avoidance property of the channel access scheme, by making impractical assumptions on the operation of the medium access control (MAC) protocol, or by overlooking the protection of link-layer acknowledgment packets. In this paper, we present a novel power controlled MAC protocol called POWMAC, which enjoys the same single-channel, single-transceiver design of the IEEE 802.11 ad hoc MAC protocol but which achieves a significant throughput improvement over the 802.11 protocol. Instead of alternating between the transmission of control (RTS/CTS) and data packets, as done in the 802.11 scheme, POWMAC uses an access window (AW) to allow for a series of request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) exchanges to take place before several concurrent data packet transmissions can commence. The length of the AW is dynamically adjusted based on localized information to allow for multiple interference-limited concurrent transmissions to take place in the same vicinity of a receiving terminal. Collision avoidance information is inserted into the CTS packet and is used to bound/ the transmission power of potentially interfering terminals in the vicinity of the receiver, rather than silencing such terminals. Simulation results are used to demonstrate the significant throughput and energy gains that can be obtained under the POWMAC protocol.     

Does the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol work well in multihop wireless adhoc networks?

The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is the standard for wireless LANs; it is widely used in testbeds and simulations for wireless multihop ad hoc networks. However, this protocol was not designed for multihop networks. Although it can support some ad hoc network architecture, it is not intended to support the wireless mobile ad hoc network, in which multihop connectivity is one of the most prominent features. In this article we focus on the following question: can the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol function well in multihop networks? By presenting several serious problems encountered in an IEEE 802.11-based multihop network and revealing the in-depth cause of these problems, we conclude that the current version of this wireless LAN protocol does not function well in multihop ad hoc networks. We thus doubt whether the WaveLAN-based system is workable as a mobile ad hoc testbed