Analysis and determination of cooperative MAC strategies from throughput perspectives

In recent years, cooperative communication has been developed as a new communication strategy that incorporates a relay node to assist direct point-to-point transmission. By exploiting cooperative diversity, different types of techniques have been proposed to improve transmission reliability from the physical layer perspective. However, owing to the longer transmission time resulting from the cooperative schemes, there is no guarantee to enhance network throughput in view of the medium access control (MAC) performance. In this paper, system throughput of combined direct/cooperative communication is evaluated by exploiting the proposed analytical model based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The feasibility of adopting either cooperative or direct communication is also studied in the analytical model. In terms of network throughput, whether to adopt cooperative schemes depends on the tradeoff between cooperative transmission delay and channel quality of direct communication. Moreover, two cooperative MAC protocols are proposed to determine the circumstances to activate cooperative communication according to the channel quality. The full-channel quality indicator based cooperative (FCC) MAC protocol is introduced to choose both the transmission scheme and the relay node according to the full channel quality information. However, the overhead caused by the FCC scheme can degrade the throughput performance as the number of available relays is significantly increased. Therefore, the bitwise competition based cooperative (BCC) MAC protocol is utilized to efficiently determine a feasible relay node for data transmission. Simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of proposed analytical models and cooperative MAC protocols. It is observed that the proposed BCC scheme can outperform both the FCC protocol and conventional direct transmission with enhanced system throughput.     

rDCF: A Relay-Enabled Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

It is well known that IEEE 802.11 provides a physical layer multirate capability and, hence, MAC layer mechanisms are needed to exploit this capability. Several solutions have been proposed to achieve this goal. However, these solutions only consider how to exploit good channel quality for the direct link between the sender and the receiver. Since IEEE 802.11 supports multiple transmission rates in response to different channel conditions, data packets may be delivered faster through a relay node than through the direct link if the direct link has low quality and low rate. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC layer relay-enabled distributed coordination function (DCF) protocol, called rDCF, to further exploit the physical layer multirate capability. We design a protocol to assist the sender, the relay node, and the receiver to reach an agreement on which data rate to use and whether to transmit the data through a relay node. Considering various issues, such as, bandwidth utilization, channel errors, and security, we propose techniques to further improve the performance of rDCF. Simulation results show that rDCF can significantly reduce the packet delay, improve the system throughput, and alleviate the impact of channel errors on fairness.     

一种简单的适合无线Mesh网络的机会协作MAC机制

针对IEEE802．11MAC（medium access control）协议中通信模式的缺陷,提出了一种新的协作MAC机制。该机制重点研究了分布式中继节点的选择算法,并定义了一种新的控制帧（retran）。目的节点通过发送retran帧启动协作机制,收到该帧的节点根据中继选择算法设置自身定时器,从而竞争产生“机会中继”,使其在源节点与目的节点之间搭建通信桥梁,该方法简单可行。仿真表明,随着网络中节点数的增加,新的机制对网络吞吐量和误比特性能的改善效果明显,从而提高了通信质量。     

IEEE 802.11 medium access control enhancements based on simultaneous multiple‐input multiple‐output bandwidth sharing

The demand for higher data rate has spurred the adoption of multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) transmission techniques in IEEE 802.11 products. MIMO techniques provide an additional spatial dimension that can significantly increase the channel capacity. A number of multiuser MIMO system have been proposed, where the multiple antenna at the physical layer are employed for multiuser access, allowing multiple users to share the same bandwidth. As these MIMO physical layer technologies further evolve, the usable bandwidth per application increases; hence, the average service time per application decreases. However, in the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function‐based systems, a considerable amount of bandwidth is wasted during the medium access and coordination process. Therefore, as the usable bandwidth is enhanced using MIMO technology, the bandwidth wastage of medium access and coordination becomes a significant performance bottleneck. Hence, there is a fundamental need for bandwidth sharing schemes at the medium access control (MAC) layer where multiple connections can concurrently use the increased bandwidth provided by the physical layer MIMO technologies. In this paper, we propose the MIMO‐aware rate splitting (MRS) MAC protocol and examine its behavior under different scenarios. MRS is a distributed MAC protocol where nodes locally cooperate with one another to share bandwidth via splitting the spatial channels of MIMO systems. Simulation results of MRS protocol are obtained and compared with those of IEEE 802.11n protocol. We show that our proposed MRS scheme can significantly outperform the IEEE 802.11n in medium access delay and throughput. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种用于AdHoc网络的协同MAC协议

基于IEEE802．11 DCF模型,利用协同分集技术,提出了一种适用于AdHoc网络的协同MAC协议。此协议在目的节点实时选择传输模式和协同节点,可有效减小节点移动和信道变化对网络性能产生的影响。同时,利用分集技术,对源节点和协同节点的数据信号进行最大比合并（MRC）,可有效提高系统的可靠性。仿真结果表明,在文中的仿真条件下,和传统IEEE802．11DCF协议相比,该协议在系统分组递交率和延迟性能上分别提高了20％和50％。     

基于物理层安全的最优化跨层调度方案

无线网络的调度方案要求以链路质量、传输率和时延等网络参数作为主要参考依据,控制和管理网络中节点的传输行为。现有的无线网络调度方案中都没有把网络安全纳入考虑,但是通常情况下,网络安全正是影响网络性能的重要因素。文中设计了一个新的无线网络调度方案,该方案可以在物理层实现通信的完美保密。通过把这个调度方案和IEEE802.11的Mac协议中已有的分布式协调功能(DCF)相结合,从而可以实现一个保证了物理层安全的新Mac协议——SecDCF。文中采用Matlab对该协议进行仿真,仿真结果显示在实现物理层安全的前提下,SecDCF相比传统的DCF可以显著提升性能。     

CoopMACA: a cooperative MAC protocol using packet aggregation

In this paper we propose a cooperative MAC protocol for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) that involves the concept of cooperation among nodes to avoid the negative effect caused by multi rate modulation employed in IEEE 802.11 standards. In our proposed protocol a low data rate direct transmission link is replaced by two faster transmission links using a relay node. During transmission, each node selects either direct or indirect transmission (through a helper node) in order to minimize the total transmission time and utilizes the packet aggregation concept to improve the system throughput. The new protocol does not violate the inter frame space specified in IEEE 802.11 and shows compatibility with the standard. We give the mathematical analysis that shows that our proposed protocol increases the system throughput considerably in comparison to the existing ones. The analytical results are supported with the help of simulation. We have shown how this protocol can be implemented in combination with others to improve the system throughput in specific network scenarios.     

A multiple relay‐based medium access control protocol in multirate wireless ad hoc networks with multiple beam antennas

The advanced technique of multiple beam antennas is recently considered in wireless networks to improve the system throughput by increasing spatial reuse, reducing collisions, and avoiding co‐channel interference. The usage of multiple beam antennas is similar to the concept of Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA), while each beam can be treated as a data channel. Wireless networks can increase the total throughput and decrease the transmission latency if the physical layer of a mobile node can support multirate capability. Multirate wireless networks incurs the anomaly problem, because low data rate hosts may influence the original performance of high data rate hosts. In this work, each node fits out multiple beam antennas with multirate capability, and a node can either simultaneously transmit or receive multiple data on multiple beams. Observe that the transmitting or receiving operation does not happen at the same time. In this paper, we propose a multiple relay‐based medium access control (MAC) protocol to improve the throughput for low data rate hosts. Our MAC protocol exploits multiple relay nodes and helps the source and the destination to create more than one data channel to significantly reduce the transmission latency. Observe that low data rate links with long‐distance transmission latencies are distributed by multiple relay nodes, hence the anomaly problem can be significantly alleviated. In addition, the ACK synchronization problem is solved to avoid the condition that source nodes do not receive ACKs from destination nodes. An adjustment operation is presented to reduce unnecessary relay nodes during the fragment burst period. Finally, simulation results illustrate that our multiple relay‐based MAC protocol can achieve high throughput and low transmission latency. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Relay-Aided Media Access (RAMA) Protocol in Multirate Wireless Networks

The IEEE 802.11 standard inherently supports multiple data rates at the physical layer. Various rate adaptation mechanisms have been proposed to exploit this multirate capability by automatically adapting the transmission rate to best utilize the wireless spectrum. This study is primarily motivated by the observation that in a wireless network, a multihop high-rate path can potentially achieve better throughput and delay than using a single-hop low-rate path for transmission. Specifically, this paper introduces a relay-aided media access (RAMA) protocol by taking advantage of the existence of such multihop high-rate links. This is demonstrated by replacing one low-rate link with two high-rate links using a relay node. One of the key novelties in the proposed RAMA protocol is that the transmission from the immediate relay node to the destination node is free of contention. Results from analysis and simulations show that RAMA can significantly improve performances in terms of both throughput and delay.     

A particle filter and joint likelihood ratio based error source diagnosing method for IEEE 802.11 networks

As a result of the fast growing scale of IEEE 802.11 networks, problems such as low signal‐to‐noise ratio, collision, and small‐scale fading have seriously impacted the performance of IEEE 802.11 networks. In this work, we describe a novel cross‐layer analysis method, using the combination of received channel power sampling at the physical (PHY) layer and information at the medium access control (MAC) layer. The proposed method analyzes the causes of error frames by recording samples of received channel power at the physical layer on a small time scale (5 μs) and employs the particle filter‐based joint likelihood ratio method in order to detect changes in the received channel power and to isolate models of the changes within the time domain. At the same time, it determines the source and the destination addresses of the error frames by decoding packet physical addresses at the MAC layer and then locates the error source. On the basis of the proposed method, optimizations are possible both at the MAC layer and the PHY layer. The simulation and the experimental validation were both carried out for the proposed method. The simulation validation was carried out in order to validate the accuracy of the particle filter‐based joint likelihood ratio method for fault detection and for model isolation using the proposed method. We compared the performance of the extended Kalman filter and the particle filter‐based likelihood ratio method using the non‐Gaussian situation for the proposed method. We then performed several experiments in order to validate the accuracy of the proposed method for error source diagnosis. We also show the applications of the proposed method. The experiments under actual scene showed that different optimizations can be made to optimize the actual wireless local area network by determining the three different causes of the errors. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cooperative quadrature physical layer network coding in wireless relay networks

This paper proposes a cooperative quadrature physical layer network coding (CQPNC) scheme for a dual‐hop cooperative relay network, which consists of two source nodes, one relay node and one destination node. All nodes in the network have one antenna, and the two source nodes transmit their signals modulated with quadrature carriers. In this paper, a cooperative quadrature physical layer network coded decode‐and‐forward (DF) relay protocol (CQPNC‐DF) is proposed to transmit the composite information from the two source nodes via the relay node to the destination node simultaneously to reduce the number of time slots required for a transmission. The proposed CQPNC‐DF relay protocol is compared with time‐division multiple‐access amplify‐and‐forward (TDMA‐AF), TDMA‐DF, cooperative network coded DF (CNC‐DF) and cooperative analog network coded AF (CANC‐AF) relay protocols to demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of bit error rate (BER) and system throughput under different propagation conditions. The simulation results reveal that the proposed CQPNC‐DF relay protocol can significantly improve the network performance. Compared with two TDMA schemes and CNC‐DF, the proposal can provide up to 100% and 50% throughput gains, respectively. Moreover, no matter what the scene, the proposed scheme always has the lowest BER in the low SNR region. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Spare node cooperative method for IEEE 802.11 networks

Most of the existing cooperation methods select relay node(s) mainly based on the channel state information, but do not consider whether the selected relay nodes work or not. If the selected relays are invalidated, the performance of cooperative communication will deteriorate. To resolve the above problem, this paper investigates cooperative communication in IEEE 802.11 networks, and proposes a novel Spare Cooperative Method (SCM). SCM chooses a spare cooperation node to enhance the reliability of communication, and uses an enhanced handshaking mechanism to coordinate the access of source nodes and cooperation nodes to the wireless channel. The performance of SCM is comprehensively analyzed in terms of outage probability and saturated throughput. The analysis shows that SCM improves the performance of IEEE 802.11.     

Performance of MIMO cross‐layer MAC protocol based on antenna selection in ad hoc networks

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a cross‐layer (physical and MAC) design for multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) system that aims at maximizing the throughput of ad hoc networks by selecting the optimum antenna combination. Employing this cross‐layer design is shown to improve the overall network performance relative to the case where no antenna selection (AS) is used. To solve the node blocking problem associated with the IEEE 802.11 medium‐access control (MAC) protocol, the proposed protocol leverage the available degrees of freedom offered by the MIMO system to allow neighboring nodes to simultaneously communicate using the zero‐forcing (ZF) Bell‐labs layered space‐time (BLAST) architecture. Using the cross‐layer design, neighboring nodes share their optimum antenna selection (AS) information through control messages. Given this shared information, nodes set their decisions on the number of selected antennas based on the available spatial channels that guarantees collision‐free transmissions. At the destination node, the ZF receiver is employed to extract the desired user data while treating the data from neighboring users as interference. The performance of the proposed cross‐layer design is examined through simulations, where we show that the network throughput is significantly improved compared to conventional MAC protocols. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Joint optimization of power and distance to minimize outage probability in transparent DF relay network

In this paper, we jointly optimize the position of the relay node and transmission power ratio of the source node over the relay node to minimize the outage probability, which can provide guidance for IEEE 802.16j transparent relay node configuration. The result indicates that the outage probability is minimum when the relay is positioned at the midway between the source and the destination, and the transmission power ratio of the source node over the relay node is 11:9. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An efficient MAC protocol for cooperative diversity in mobile ad hoc networks

Cooperative diversity is proposed to combat the detrimental effects of channel fading. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of cooperative diversity in interference limited ad hoc networks. The negative effects due to relay blocking on the network throughput are investigated. We show that the relay blocking problem is mainly dependent on the relay selection criterion. To overcome this problem, we propose a new cooperative diversity technique based on a modified IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. The throughput performance of the proposed MAC protocol is analyzed using a random structured network where nodes are assumed to be equipped with multiple antennas. In our simulations, we consider both single‐ and multiple‐relay scenarios over fading channels. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种基于源端网络编码和交替传输的中继协作方案

针对源节点通过两个中继向目的节点发送数据的无线通信系统,为了减小传统中继协作方案的复用损失,提出了一种将源端网络编码和交替传输有效结合起来的新方案,称为交替源端网络编码(SSNC)。该方案在源端每三个时隙对发送数据进行一次网络编码,并且两个中继在相邻的时隙中交替的发送和接收数据,每个时隙中,一个中继接收源端数据的同时另一个中继转发上一个时隙其接收到的数据给目的端。通过对该方案的中断概率和分集复用折中性能的推导和分析,发现该方案相对于传统的重复编码和分布式空时码方案在获得相同分集阶数的情况下有更高的传输效率,在实际的通信系统中可以兼顾性能和效率。仿真结果证实了我们的结论。      

一种基于IEEE 802．11a的PHY—MAC跨层设计

文章基于IEEE802．11a协议,从理论上分析了物理层的编码速率、调制方式,以及MAC层的数据帧长度对吞吐率的影响,提出一种基于PHY和MAC层的跨层算法。仿真结果表明,文章提出的PHY-MAC跨层传输方案能显著提高系统的数据吞吐率。     

Mitigating tail latency in IEEE 802.11–based networks

Delay sensitive applications are being actively introduced with the advent of 5G and vehicular communications, and such applications are very sensitive to tail latency. However, tail latency has not been seriously considered so far, especially in IEEE 802.11–based networks. Channel access is scheduled by random Contention Window (CW) values in IEEE 802.11–based networks, and the node with the larger CW waits longer, and it may even observe multiple transmissions from a single contending node, which results in a long latency tail. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized MAC called SynchMAC to mitigate this latency tail. In SynchMAC, every competing node transmits exactly one packet within a virtual time slot without a centralized controller. Using the proposed approach, the maximum channel access latency is bounded by T×2N, where T is the time required for transmitting a single packet (including Inter‐Frame Space and CW) and N is the number of competing nodes. To maximize the system throughput, the proposed scheme optimizes the value of T by considering the probability of successful transmission. Our simulation study shows that SynchMAC reduces the maximum access latency by up to 94% and 53% compared with the conventional IEEE 802.11 MAC and the comparative scheme, respectively, without degrading throughput performance. We also show that SynchMAC is easily extended to support weighted access.     

A traffic control system for IEEE 802.11 networks based on available bandwidth estimation

To support Quality of service (QoS)‐sensitive applications like real‐time video streaming in IEEE 802.11 networks, a MAC layer extension for QoS, IEEE 802.11e, has been recently ratified as a standard. This MAC layer solution, however, addresses only the issue of prioritized access to the wireless medium and leaves such issues as QoS guarantee and admission control to the traffic control systems at the higher layers. This paper presents an IP‐layer traffic control system for IEEE 802.11 networks based on available bandwidth estimation. We build an analytical model for estimating the available bandwidth by extending an existing throughput computation model, and implement a traffic control system that provides QoS guarantees and admission control by utilizing the estimated available bandwidth information. We have conducted extensive performance evaluation of the proposed scheme via both simulations and measurements in the real test‐bed. The experiment results show that our estimation model and traffic control system work accurately and effectively in various network load conditions without IEEE 802.11e. The presence of IEEE 802.11e will allow even more efficient QoS provision, as the proposed scheme and the MAC layer QoS support will complement each other. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.