Resource Allocation in High Data Rate Mesh WPAN: A Survey Paper

IEEE 802.15.3 High data rate wireless personal area networks (HDR WPANs) have been developed to communicate with devices within 10 m at high speed. A mesh network made up of a parent piconet and several child piconets can support multi-hop communications. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been expected to be the ultimate solution for the next decade wireless networking, showing rapid progress and many new inspiring applications. The international standardization organizations formed working groups to address the problem of standardization for WMNs. These groups were the IEEE 802.15.5 (mesh extensions for WPANs),the IEEE 802.11s (mesh extensions for WLANs), and the IEEE 802.16a (mesh extensions for WiMAX). The IEEE 802.15.5 standard is the standard which defines specifications for including multi-hop functionality in the legacy 802.15.3 and 802.15.4 low data rate (LDR) WPAN networks. The impetus for a WPAN to operate in a mesh topology is to increase the network coverage without increasing the transmit power, to increase the route reliability via route redundancy, self-configuration, and efficient use of device battery life. In the case of meshed WPANs, multiple WPAN clusters compete for channel time in a shared superframe. Therefore, it is essential to determine the channel time requirements of each cluster with a certain number of devices and to determine how these clusters can compete to the shared channel time. In this paper, we investigate the different resource allocation mechanisms related to the meshed HDR WPANs for the 802.15.3 and the 802.15.5 standards. We introduce the single hop and the multi-hop IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN architectures. This is followed by the introduction of the IEEE 802.15.5 standard that provides the mesh capabilities for extending the coverage area of HDR WPANs. The current on-going research issues for resource allocation, including beacon interference, reservation collision etc., in both meshed 802.15.3 and 802.15.5 are alluded to.     

A Simple Time Shift Scheme for Beacon Broadcasting Based on Cluster-Tree IEEE 802.15.4 Low-Rate WPANs

Wireless sensor networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is able to carry out short-distance transmissions in low-rate and low-power wireless personal area networks. To access the channel, it uses the slotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) in the contention access period (CAP) under superframe structure with beacon frame broadcast to bound the duration of superframe. However, the beacon frame is transmitted periodically without CSMA/CA so that it could be collided continuously. This type of collision causes node lost synchronization and unable to join a network because the beacon frame cannot be normally received. This paper proposes a simple time shift scheme based on IEEE 802.15.4 to keep original superframe structure and distribute transmission of beacon frame over active period to avoid beacon frame collisions. We use a simple function to allocate beacon frame transmission in the active period. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the beacon collision and lost synchronization rate, and it also improves the throughput.     

An Adaptive Beacon Scheduling Mechanism Using Power Control in Cluster-Tree WPANs

This paper presents an adaptive beacon scheduling mechanism using power control in cluster-tree network. We consider the emerging low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs) technology as specified in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard that can support environmental monitoring applications. Node clustering is a useful topology management approach to reduce channel contention and improve the network lifetime in wireless sensor networks. A cluster-tree network conforming to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is formed by several coordinators that periodically send beacon frames to the nodes of their cluster. However, if these periodic beacon frames are sent without any particular scheduling, they will collide with each other and those nodes that wait for them will lose synchronization with their coordinators. The purpose of this paper is to overcome this problem by proposing an adaptive beacon scheduling mechanism using power control, cluster grouping, and the group identifier (GID) in cluster-tree WPANs. This mechanism is designed such that all of the sensing devices send the measured received power level back to their cluster heads (CHs), thus enabling them to adjust their transmission power level after the construction of the topology. Following this, the PAN coordinator divides all of the CHs into several cluster groups (CGs) in order to transmit their beacon frames simultaneously without encountering any direct or indirect beacon frame collision problems. The PAN coordinator selects the group heads (GHs) and assigns the GID for each cluster group. In addition, the PAN coordinator controls the beacon transmission time of all of the CHs and GHs in the CGs using the GID information located in the beacon frame of the PAN coordinator in order to avoid beacon frame collisions. Accordingly, the overall lifetime of the network in cluster-tree WPANs is prolonged by solving the problem of beacon frame collisions. We evaluated the performance of our scheme through a mathematical analysis and a series of simulations using the Network Simulator 2 (NS-2).

A Wireless MAC Protocol with Collision Detection

The most popular strategies for dealing with packet collisions at the medium access control (MAC) layer in distributed wireless networks use a combination of carrier sensing and collision avoidance. When the collision avoidance strategy fails, such schemes cannot detect collisions and corrupted data frames are still transmitted in their entirety, thereby wasting the channel bandwidth and significantly reducing the network throughput. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new wireless MAC protocol capable of collision detection. The basic idea of the proposed protocol is the use of pulses in an out-of-band control channel for exploring channel condition and medium reservation and achieving both collision avoidance and collision detection. The performance of the proposed MAC protocol has been investigated using extensive analysis and simulations. Our results show that, as compared with existing MAC protocols, the proposed protocol has significant performance gains in terms of node throughput. Additionally, the proposed protocol is fully distributed and requires no time synchronization among nodes.     

Hidden node collision recovery protocol for low rate wireless personal area networks

Referring to most media access control (MAC) protocols in low rate personal area networks (LR‐WPANs), there is no hidden node collision avoidance mechanism utilized. Quantitative analysis in this paper based on the IEEE 802.15.4 specification shows a high probability of the continuous hidden node collisions (CHNCs), which seriously decreases network throughput. Based on this observation, we propose a cost‐efficient recovery mechanism to achieve fast self‐healing when LR‐WPANs suffer CHNCs, while introducing no overhead when there are no collisions. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed protocol in terms of network throughput and power saving. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种WPAN网络信标期融合改进方案

基于超宽带技术的ECMA标准采用分布式网络结构,是高速无线个域网理想的选择,本文针对该标准的信标期融合算法进行了研究,并利用无线个域网的信标时隙复用的特性,提出了一种改进的信标期融合方案,经过仿真验证,该方案可以大幅减少网络稳定所需时间,有效减少网络开销。     

Interference modeling and performance of Bluetooth MAC protocol

The emergence of Bluetooth as a default radio interface has allowed handheld electronic devices to be instantly interconnected as ad hoc networks. These short-range ad hoc wireless networks, called piconets, operate in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz ISM (Industrial-Scientific-Medical) band where devices may be used to configure single or overlapping piconets, known as scatternet. As all piconets operate in the same frequency band, the presence of multiple piconets in the vicinity may create interference on signal reception. This paper employs a signal capture model to study the piconet MAC performance, taking inter-piconet interference into consideration. This model leads to several important mathematical relationships for Bluetooth networks, including successful packet transmission probability. Furthermore, our model and anticipated throughput are validated using extensive simulation. These results indicate that Bluetooth throughput is affected by multiple piconet interference. Definitely, our model can be considered to provide a solid foundation for future interference aware Bluetooth protocols.     

EBA: an enhancement of the IEEE 802.11 DCF via distributed reservation

The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless local area networks (WLANs) employs a medium access control (MAC), called distributed coordination function (DCF), which is based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). The collision avoidance mechanism utilizes the random backoff prior to each frame transmission attempt. The random nature of the backoff reduces the collision probability, but cannot completely eliminate collisions. It is known that the throughput performance of the 802.11 WLAN is significantly compromised as the number of stations increases. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed reservation-based MAC protocol, called early backoff announcement (EBA), which is backward compatible with the legacy DCF. Under EBA, a station announces its future backoff information in terms of the number of backoff slots via the MAC header of its frame being transmitted. All the stations receiving the information avoid collisions by excluding the same backoff duration when selecting their future backoff value. Through extensive simulations, EBA is found to achieve a significant increase in the throughput performance as well as a higher degree of fairness compared to the 802.11 DCF.     

Partition and Cooperation for Crowded Multi-rate WLANs

Recently, growth in smart devices has increased along with the number of wireless nodes in wireless local area networks (WLANs). The increased number of nodes causes throughput degradation due to frequent collisions between nodes. In multi-rate environments, transmission at low data rates limits the throughput of WLANs, and we call it performance anomaly. The time fairness approach has been proposed to resolve the performance anomaly. However, in the time fairness approach, nodes, which transmit at low data rates, experience lower throughput than in the IEEE 802.11 standard. In this paper, we propose a new medium access control (MAC) protocol, called partition and cooperation based MAC (PCMAC), to simultaneously solve these problems including frequent collisions, performance anomaly, and low throughput under time fairness scheme. First, we calculate the optimum number of nodes, which maximizes the data transmission time, for each data rate. Second, for resolving performance anomaly and reducing collisions, we divide the nodes into several partitions based on the data rate and the optimum number of nodes. Each partition has a different transmission time slot that is proportional to the number of nodes. Finally, we propose a cooperative communication scheme using a relay partition to improve the throughput of nodes with low data rates and to achieve robust cooperative transmission. PCMAC is evaluated through extensive simulation and simulation with measured data. The results show that our scheme effectively improves WLAN performance.     

Collision avoidance slot allocation scheme for multi-cluster wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces a collision avoidance slot allocation scheme for Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based Medium Access Control (MAC) in multi-cluster wireless sensor networks. TDMA MAC protocols have built-in active-sleep duty cycle that can be leveraged for limiting idle listening. Also, they can overcome the overhearing problem, thus have better energy efficiency. Enabling concurrent intra-cluster communications using a single radio channel is a key issue in TDMA MAC protocols. Using orthogonal frequency channels or different Code Division Multiple Access codes for different adjacent clusters can solve the problem at the expense of cost. In this paper, we propose a new distributed slot allocation protocol called  Coordinated   Time   Slot   Allocation (CTSA) that can reduce collisions significantly using a single radio channel. We use simulations to study the effects of different system parameters on the performance of our proposed protocol. Simulation results show that applying CTSA over clustering protocols can significantly reduce collisions. It also shows fast convergence for our proposed CTSA protocol. In this paper we apply our CTSA scheme to the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy protocol which forms the basis for many cluster based routing protocols. CTSA is also compared with the SRSA algorithm proposed by Wu and Biswas (Wirel Netw 13(5):691–703, 2007) by means of simulation.     

Performance evaluation of candidate MAC protocols for LMCS/LMDSnetworks

Broadband wireless access (BWA) offers attractive features such as ease and speed of deployment, fast realization of revenues, and low infrastructure cost. This paper focuses on medium access control (MAC) alternatives that can find application in an LMDS/LMCS network capable of supporting multimedia traffic. Multifrequency demand assignment TDMA-based schemes appear (at the moment) to be a suitable choice in this context. The selected protocol should be dynamically capable of providing multirate capabilities and quality-of-service guarantees. An obvious candidate for the aforementioned purpose is the LMDS-specific MAC proposal in the DAVIC 1.2 recommendation. For purposes of comparison, we also examine the evolving IEEE 802.14 MAC convergence protocol and MCNS (multimedia cable network system) DOCSIS (ITU J-112) MAC standard that are intended to support similar applications and services in an HFC (hybrid fiber coax) environment. The three protocols are examined under noiseless and noisy channel conditions. Previous results on LMDS channel characteristics are summarized and used for modeling noisy channel conditions. The candidate protocols are compared in terms of mean access delay, throughput, and collision multiplicity statistics, when contention of users is involved. The effect of dynamic slot allocation on the performance of the candidate protocols is also examined     

Design of MAC protocols with fast collision resolution for wireless local area networks

Development of efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols providing both high throughput performance for data traffic and good quality of service (QoS) support for real-time traffic is the current major focus in distributed contention-based MAC protocol research. In this paper, we propose an efficient contention resolution algorithm for wireless local area networks, namely, the fast collision resolution (FCR) algorithm. The MAC protocol with this new algorithm attempts to provide significantly higher throughput performance for data services than the IEEE 802.11 MAC algorithm and more advanced dynamic tuning backoff (DTB) algorithm. We demonstrate that this algorithm indeed resolves collisions faster and reduces the idle slots more effectively. To provide good fairness performance and to support good QoS for real-time traffic, we incorporate the self-clocked fair queueing algorithm and a priority scheme into the FCR algorithm and come up with the real-time FCR (RT-FCR) algorithm, and show that RT-FCR can simultaneously achieve high throughput and good fairness performance for nonreal-time traffic while maintaining satisfactory QoS support for real-time traffic.     

Optimal contention window size for IEEE 802.15.3c mmWave WPANs

The millimeter-wave (mmWave) band offers the potential for multi-gigabit indoor Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). However, it has problems such as short communication coverage due to high propagation losses. In order to compensate for this drawback, utilization of directional antennas at the physical layer is highly recommended. In this paper, we consider the adequate contention window (CW) size for directional carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). To find the optimal CW size that enhances the performance of conventional directional CSMA/CA, we propose an enhanced directional CSMA/CA algorithm. The algorithm is considered in IEEE 802.15.3c, a standard for mmWave WPANs, under saturation environments. For the algorithm, we present a Markov chain model and analyze it for the no-ACK mode. The effects of directional antennas and the features of IEEE 802.15.3c Medium Access Control (MAC) such as backoff counter freezing are considered in the model. The optimal CW sizes for the two different objective functions are derived from the numerical results. The numerical results also show that the system throughput and average transmission delay of the proposed algorithm outperform those of conventional one and the overall analysis is verified by simulation. The obtained results provide the criterion for selecting the optimal parameters and developing a MAC protocol that enhances the performance of mmWave WPANs.     

The Orphan Problem in ZigBee Wireless Networks

ZigBee is a communication standard which is considered to be suitable for wireless sensor networks. In ZigBee, a device (with a permanent 64-bit MAC address) is said to join a network if it can successfully obtain a 16-bit network address from a parent device. Parent devices calculate addresses for their child devices by a distributed address assignment scheme. This assignment is easy to implement, but it restricts the number of children of a device and the depth of the network. We observe that the ZigBee address assignment policy is too conservative, thus usually making the utilization of the address pool poor. Those devices that cannot receive network addresses will be isolated from the network and become orphan nodes. In this paper, we show that the orphan problem can be divided into two subproblems: the bounded-degree-and-depth tree formation (BDDTF) problem and the end-device maximum matching (EDMM) problem. We then propose algorithms to relieve the orphan problem. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes can effectively reduce the number of orphan devices compared to the ZigBee strategy.     

A deterministic channel access scheme for multimedia streaming in WiMedia networks

WiMedia MAC is an attractive transmission technology for high rate multimedia streaming and high quality consumer electronic devices in wireless personal area networks. In this paper, we propose a deterministic channel access (DCA), where all the devices determine their transmission orders in a distributed manner by exchanging beacon frames in the beacon period. Since all of the devices follow a deterministic transmission order, collision-free channel access can be achieved and thus the throughput can be significantly improved. In addition, the DCA addresses unfairness problems found in channel access by using circulating reference points. The trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that the DCA outperforms the existing channel access schemes in WiMedia MAC under different situations, especially under bursty traffic.     

Collision analysis of CSMA/CA based MAC protocol for duty cycled WBANs

Collision problem is critical for the performance of coexisting Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). This paper presents a collision analysis of CSMA/CA based MAC protocol in the view of collision probability under duty cycled superframe structure. Firstly, we discuss two types of chief collisions at a micro level (i.e., staggered collisions and direct collisions) in the presence of hidden and exposed terminals, respectively. Then we discuss various direct collisions between RTS/CTS frames in slotted CSMA/CA. Furthermore, we highlight a special type of direct collisions which can neither be detected by interfering nodes nor discovered before the collisions of DATAs (i.e., indiscoverable collisions). A hypothesis, several propositions and conclusions are presented to explain which is the domination of the collisions and how the direct collisions are released. Numerical results verify our conclusions and confirm that the indiscoverable collisions turn out to be another key issue in coexisting WBANs. The simulation in mobile environment with time-varying traffic is carried out to show the impact of collisions on network performance. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the most comprehensive collision analysis at the micro level for the evolution of CSMA/CA based MAC protocol and the first estimation of indiscoverable collisions in duty cycled WBANs.     

A deadlock model for a multi‐service medium access protocol employing multi‐slot N‐ary stack algorithm (msSTART)

Many modern multi‐service medium access protocols (MACs) use a collision based capacity request signaling channel as part of a hybrid TDMA frame structure. Multi‐slot Stack Random Access Algorithm (msSTART) is proposed for use in IEEE 802.14 hybrid fiber/coaxial network and will be highly relevant for the S‐MAC development of evolving WATM MAC specifications. This paper studies the performance of msSTART as an example of a Q‐ary tree contention resolution algorithm (CRA) in the wireless environment using the novel Basic Deadlock model. We contrast approximate results for msSTART performance obtained by simulation under extreme inter‐station correlation with analytical results for the more popular p‐persistence CRA used in several testbed WATM implementations. Using three signaling channel schemes designed to provide support for increased system stability, to implement priority in the wireless MAC, and maximise efficiency, we provide comparative results for evaluation of msSTART and p‐persistence ALOHA under what the IEEE 802.14 working group has termed the “disaster scenario”. We find that of the three schemes evaluated the full Contention Mini‐Slot (CMS) sharing scheme employing multiple CMSs per data region extends the protocol's useable load region the furthest. We conclude that Q‐ary tree contention resolution algorithms (in particular msSTART) are best adapted to the wireless environment, providing less case sensitive performance. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Iterative multipacket detection for high throughput transmissions in OFDM systems

This paper presents a multipacket detection technique for dealing with packet collisions in OFDM schemes (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). Instead of discarding collided packets as it is done in traditional MAC approaches (Medium Access Control) additional packets are transmitted and separated using Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) based techniques. Reliable detection and high throughputs can be achieved as long as different interleavers are used for different retransmissions. We also include a method for estimating the users involved in the collision.     

A slotted access control protocol for metropolitan WDM ring networks

In this study we focus on the serious scalability problems that many access protocols for WDM ring networks introduce due to the use of a dedicated wavelength per access node for either transmission or reception. We propose an efficient slotted MAC protocol suitable for WDM ring metropolitan area networks. The proposed network architecture employs a separate wavelength for control information exchange prior to the data packet transmission. Each access node is equipped with a pair of tunable transceivers for data communication and a pair of fixed tuned transceivers for control information exchange. Also, each access node includes a set of fixed delay lines for synchronization reasons; to keep the data packets, while the control information is processed. An efficient access algorithm is applied to avoid both the data wavelengths and the receiver collisions. In our protocol, each access node is capable of transmitting and receiving over any of the data wavelengths, facing the scalability issues. Two different slot reuse schemes are assumed: the source and the destination stripping schemes. For both schemes, performance measures evaluation is provided via an analytic model. The analytical results are validated by a discrete event simulation model that uses Poisson traffic sources. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol manages efficient bandwidth utilization, especially under high load. Also, comparative simulation results prove that our protocol achieves significant performance improvement as compared with other WDMA protocols which restrict transmission over a dedicated data wavelength. Finally, performance measures evaluation is explored for diverse numbers of buffer size, access nodes and data wavelengths.