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.     

A two‐way relay framework based on interference cancellation in wireless networks

The two‐way relay (TWR) protocols are efficient in providing appreciable throughput gains in wireless networks through the use of network coding to combine packets from multiple channels. The key determinant factor in driving the throughput improvement is the degree of simultaneity achieved in the relay scheme. In this paper, we propose a new TWR protocol named interference cancellation TWR (IC‐TWR), which combines network coding, spatial diversity, and IC techniques to arrive at high degree of simultaneity and in the meanwhile to relax the requirement on channel state information as compared with TWR schemes based on amplify‐and‐forward. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed IC‐TWR is uniformly advantageous over the traditional decode‐and‐forward scheme in terms of system throughput and end‐to‐end delay. The proposed scheme may be useful for system designers of high‐speed multimedia applications in wireless mobile networks, wireless cellular networks, wireless sensor networks, and so on. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Comparison of Multichannel MAC Protocols

This paper compares, through analysis and simulation, a number of multichannel MAC protocols. We first classify these protocols into four categories based on their principles of operation: dedicated control channel, common hopping, split phase, and parallel rendezvous protocols. We then examine the effects of the number of channels and devices, channel switching times, and traffic patterns on the throughput and delay of the protocols. Here are some of the conclusions of our study: (1) parallel rendezvous protocols generally perform better than single rendezvous protocols, (2) the dedicated control channel protocol can be a good approach with its simplicity when the number of channels is high and the packets are long, and (3) the split phase protocol is very sensitive to the durations of the control and data phases. Our study focuses on a single collision domain.     

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.     

An efficient network coded ARQ for multisource multidestination relay networks over mixed flat fading channels

This paper proposes a new reliable automatic repeat request (ARQ) transmission protocol for wireless multisource multidestination relay networks over mixed fading channels. Conventional application of ARQ protocols to retransmit lost or erroneous packets in relay networks can cause considerable delay latency with a significant increase in the number of retransmissions when networks consist of multiple sources and multiple destinations. To address this issue, a new ARQ protocol based on network coding (NC) is proposed where the relay detects packets from different transmission sources, then uses NC to combine and forward lost packets to their destinations. An efficient means for the retransmission of all lost packets is proposed through two packet-combination algorithms for retransmissions at the relay and sources. The paper derives mathematical formulation of transmission bandwidth for this new NC-based ARQ protocol and compares analytical and simulation results with some other ARQ protocols over both mixed Rayleigh and Rician flat fading channel. The mixed fading model permits investigation of two typical fading scenarios where the relay is located in the neighbourhood of either the sources or the destinations. The transmission bandwidth results show that the proposed NC-based ARQ protocol demonstrates superior performance over other existing ARQ schemes.     

Multi‐channel power‐controlled directional MAC for wireless mesh networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged recently as a technology for providing high‐speed last mile connectivity in next‐generation wireless networks. Several MAC protocols that exploit multiple channels and directional antennas have been proposed in the literature to increase the performance of WMNs. However, while these techniques can improve the wireless medium utilization by reducing radio interference and the impact of the exposed nodes problem, they can also exacerbate the hidden nodes problem. Therefore, efficient MAC protocols need to be carefully designed to fully exploit the features offered by multiple channels and directional antennas. In this paper we propose a novel Multi‐Channel Power‐Controlled Directional MAC protocol (MPCD‐MAC) for nodes equipped with multiple network interfaces and directional antennas. MPCD‐MAC uses the standard RTS‐CTS‐DATA‐ACK exchange procedure. The novel difference is the transmission of the RTS and CTS packets in all directions on a separate control channel, while the DATA and ACK packets are transmitted only directionally on an available data channel at the minimum required power, taking into account the interference generated on already active connections. This solution spreads the information on wireless medium reservation (RTS/CTS) to the largest set of neighbors, while data transfers take place directionally on separate channels to increase spatial reuse. Furthermore, power control is used to limit the interference produced over active nodes. We measure the performance of MPCD‐MAC by simulation of several realistic network scenarios, and we compare it with other approaches proposed in the literature. The results show that our scheme increases considerably both the total traffic accepted by the network and the fairness among competing connections. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross-Layer Based Opportunistic MAC Protocols for QoS Provisionings Over Cognitive Radio Wireless Networks

We propose the cross-layer based opportunistic multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocols, which integrate the spectrum sensing at physical (PHY) layer with the packet scheduling at MAC layer, for the wireless ad hoc networks. Specifically, the MAC protocols enable the secondary users to identify and utilize the leftover frequency spectrum in a way that constrains the level of interference to the primary users. In our proposed protocols, each secondary user is equipped with two transceivers. One transceiver is tuned to the dedicated control channel, while the other is designed specifically as a cognitive radio that can periodically sense and dynamically use the identified un-used channels. To obtain the channel state accurately, we propose two collaborative channel spectrum-sensing policies, namely, the random sensing policy and the negotiation-based sensing policy, to help the MAC protocols detect the availability of leftover channels. Under the random sensing policy, each secondary user just randomly selects one of the channels for sensing. On the other hand, under the negotiation-based sensing policy, different secondary users attempt to select the distinct channels to sense by overhearing the control packets over the control channel. We develop the Markov chain model and the M/G^Y/1-based queueing model to characterize the performance of our proposed multi-channel MAC protocols under the two types of channel-sensing policies for the saturation network and the non-saturation network scenarios, respectively. In the non-saturation network case, we quantitatively identify the tradeoff between the aggregate traffic throughput and the packet transmission delay, which can provide the insightful guidelines to improve the delay-QoS provisionings over cognitive radio wireless networks.     

Performance evaluation of CSMA/ID MAC protocol for IP over WDM ring networks

In this paper, a packet pre‐classification media access control protocol based on a carrier sense multiple access with idle detection (CSMA/ID) scheme is investigated for supporting IP packets over all‐optical WDM ring networks. The purpose of the protocol is to increase throughput and to decrease the packet transmission delay of IP packets over optical networks in a metropolitan area network. This protocol avoids both packet collision and packet fragmentation. In order to improve the utilization of the network, the packets transmitted from a local area network are first pre‐classified into various class queues of an access point (AP) according to their length. After checking the available space based on the wavelength received by the receivers of the AP, the packets in the queues are transmitted. An analytical model is developed to evaluate the performance of the protocol, with simulation results showing good network efficiency. The proposed network has short‐term variations that introduce unfairness conditions. This problem could be overcome by assigning a quota on individual queues to allow all queues fair access. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种基于IEEE802.11支持QoS自适应调度器模型和算法

这篇文章提出了能够有效支持QoS的IEEE802．11自适应调度器模型。和以往的支持QoS的调度器模型相比，这里根据在主控接入点(MAP：Master Access Point)和用户终端(UT：User Termination)的各自延时需求对满足不同的传输机制的分组流进行自适应调度。这种机制不仅完全兼容当前支持QoS的IEEE802．11MAC协议标准，而且能够有效减少由于实时传输带来的分组延时，增加满足不同信道负载和带宽要求的数据流的吞吐率。实时测试得到的数据基本验证了这个要求。     

EAOMDV-MIMC: A Multipath Routing Protocol for Multi-Interface Multi-Channel Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Multipath routing has been proposed to improve performance of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). However, due to: (1) nodes lacking of network interface and (2) route coupling, using multiple paths concurrently in conventional single channel MANETs rarely exhibit performance gain. To improve performance, an ad-hoc routing protocol (and its extension) that utilizes multiple homogeneous network interface is proposed in this paper. Unlike other related multi-channel routing protocols, channels are not assigned. Instead, nodes are allowed to make use of all available channels they are tuned to. In the base protocol, nodes estimate channel conditions by monitoring their network interface queues and distribute data packets to different channels and next-hops according to their conditions. In the extended protocol, estimated channel condition at a node is further propagated to neighboring nodes by piggybacking channel condition information in data packets. With overhearing, other nodes can retrieve this information to make better next-hop selections. Extensive simulation studies show that our protocol outperforms other related multi-channel routing protocols.     

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.     

PROTON: a media access control protocol for optical networks withstar topology

A new multiple access protocol called PROTON (PROTocol for Optical Networks) is developed for optical local area networks based on a passive star topology. PROTON uses wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and is highly bandwidth-efficient. One of the available wavelengths is used as a control channel. Time is divided into fixed-sized slots. The size of the slots is the same for the control and the data channels. Before transmitting a packet, a station must compete with others for a slot in a data wavelength, using a collision-free procedure. Transmitting stations and the corresponding wavelengths for their data transmissions are determined at each station by a simple arbitration scheme. The protocol is suitable for networks where the number of users can be much larger than the number of available data channels. In addition to propagation delays, it is considered that transmitter and receiver tuning times as well as the times required to process control packets are not negligible. Whenever possible, and to maximize the throughput of the network, tuning and processing times of transmitters and receivers are overlapped with each other and with data transmission times. Also, data slot requests and packet transmissions are scheduled in a pipeline fashion, thus reducing the detrimental effects on throughput and packet delay of long propagation delays. The paper includes an analysis of the maximum throughput characteristics of PROTON. An analytical model is developed, and several performance measures are obtained     

Performance Analysis of a Bandwidth Guaranteed Medium Access Control Protocol for WDM Local Networks

In this paper, we propose and analyze a bandwidth guaranteed medium access control protocol for broadcast-and-select WDM local networks with a star topology. The proposed protocol is based on a combination of contention and dedicated reservation mechanisms for time slotted WDM networks. Every node accesses the data channel by transmitting request packets in minislots on a separate control channel. There are two types of minislots; dedicated minislots and contention minislots. Nodes requiring bandwidth guarantees, called guaranteed nodes, use dedicated minislots that are assigned by the centralized control node. The remaining nodes, called random-access nodes, share contention minislots using a distributed random access mechanism. The dedicated minislots can guarantee a minimum bandwidth for the guaranteed nodes. The contention minislots enable on-demand services at the optical layer and achieve good fairness for the remaining bandwidth. Here, the data channels are dynamically assigned to the minislots successfully returned on a first-come-first-served (FCFS) basis. This protocol can combine the best of centralized and distributed access protocols such as simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility. We analyze the maximum throughput and verify the results by simulation.     

A hybrid reservation-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, such as long propagation delay and low available bandwidth, media access control (MAC) protocol designed for the underwater acoustic sensor network (UWASN) is quite different from that for the terrestrial wireless sensor network. However, for the contention-based MAC protocols, the packet transmission time is long because of the long preamble in real acoustic modems, which increase the packet collisions. And the competition phase lasts for long time when many nodes are competing for the channel to access. For the schedule-based MAC protocols, the delay is too long, especially in a UWASN with low traffic load. In order to resolve these problems, a hybrid reservation-based MAC (HRMAC) protocol is proposed for UWASNs in this paper. In the proposed HRMAC protocol, the nodes reserve the channel by declaring and spectrum spreading technology is used to reduce the collision of the control packets. Many nodes with data packets to be transmitted can reserve the channel simultaneously, and nodes with reserved channel transmit their data in a given order. The performance analysis shows that the proposed HRMAC protocol can improve the channel efficiency greatly. Simulation results also show that the proposed HRMAC protocol achieves better performance, namely higher network throughput, lower packet drop ratio, smaller end-to-end delay, less overhead of control packets and lower energy overhead, compared to existing typical MAC protocols for the UWASNs.     

一种基于有限状态机的新型水声网络多址接入协议的实现

本文首先提出了一种新型的水声通信网络的多址接入(UAMA)协议.该协议针对水声信道传播时延长的特点,利用扩频码进行多信道预约;通过适当的控制方法,采用与传统的握手协议不同的机制,当发送方发送request_to_send(RTS)后,在选择的业务信道上立刻传输数据,而不必等收到clear_to_send(CTS)后再传输数据,在时间和空间上大大地提高了信道的利用率,因此极大地提高了网络的吞吐量.通过使用OPNET Modeler/Radio仿真器对UAMA协议进行了基于有限状态机(FSM)的建模和设计.仿真结果表明该协议能在水声环境下取得优良的吞吐性能和较低的分组传输时延.     

A QoS Routing Protocol with Bandwidth Allocation in Multichannel Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile multimedia applications have recently generated much interest in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) supporting quality-of-service (QoS) communications. Multiple non-interfering channels are available in 802.11 and 802.15 based wireless networks. Capacity of such channels can be combined to achieve higher QoS performance than for single channel networks. The capacity of MANETs can be substantially increased by equipping each network node with multiple interfaces that can operate on multiple non-overlapping channels. However, new scheduling, channel assignment, and routing protocols are required to utilize the increased bandwidth in multichannel MANETs. In this paper, we propose an on-demand routing protocol M-QoS-AODV in multichannel MANETs that incorporates a distributed channel assignment scheme and routing discovery process to support multimedia communication and to satisfy QoS bandwidth requirement. The proposed channel assignment scheme can efficiently express the channel usage and interference information within a certain range, which reduces interference and enhances channel reuse rate. This cross-layer design approach can significantly improve the performance of multichannel MANETs over existing routing algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed M-QoS-AODV protocol can effectively increase throughput and reduce delay, as compared to AODV and M-AODV-R protocols.     

Multiwavelength control protocols for WDM networks with restricted data channel collision

A new network architecture which uses several wavelengths as control channels for co‐ordination of packet transmissions on data channels for single‐hop WDMA networks and passive star topology is introduced in this paper. The presented multiwavelength control architecture distributes control information over the total control channels and in conjunction with a suitable network interface, reduces the headers electronic processing bottleneck at each end station. Also, the access schemes decrease the contention on data channels by avoiding part of the data channel collision. Some cases of multiple access protocols for asynchronous and synchronous (re)transmission categories are suggested. The proposed schemes adopt the slotted ALOHA protocol for the access to control and data multichannel systems in which the data packets transmission starts immediately after the control packets transmission. An analytic model is developed and analysed for performance measures evaluation based on Poisson approximations statistics and a finite population. The effect of receiver collision is analysed and estimated by the average rejection probability at destination. Also, numerical results are discussed for various numbers of control and data channels. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On a joint temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment and routing scheme in resource-constrained wireless mesh networks

Use of multiple orthogonal channels can significantly improve network throughput of multi-hop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). In these WMNs where multiple channels are available, channel assignment is done either in a centralized manner, which unfortunately shows a poor scalability with respect to the increase of network size, or in a distributed manner, where at least one channel has to be dedicated for exchanging necessary control messages or time synchronization has to be utilized for managing the duration of data packet transmission, causing excessive system overhead and waste of bandwidth resource. In this paper, we first formulate multi-channel assignment as a NP-hard optimization problem. Then a distributed, heuristic temporal-spatial multi-channel assignment and routing scheme is proposed, assuming every wireless node in the network is equipped with a single-radio interface. Here the gateway node is set to use all the channels sequentially in a round-robin fashion. This temporal scheme ensures all the nodes that need to directly communicate with the gateway node shall have a fair access to it. For those non-gateway nodes, a spatial scheme where channels are assigned based on their neighbors’ channel usage is adopted to exploit parallel communications and avoid channel interference among nodes. Furthermore, since the routing factors, including channel usage of neighbor nodes, node hop count, node memory size, and node communication history, are all considered along with the channel assignment, network performance, measured by packet delivery latency, channel usage ratio, and memory usage ratio, tends to be considerably enhanced. The simulation results have confirmed that, compared with a couple of well-known multi-channel assignment schemes, such as LCM [21] and ROMA [15], the proposed scheme shows substantial improvement in network throughput with a very modest collision level. In addition, the proposed scheme is highly scalable as the algorithm complexity is only linearly dependent on the total number of channels that are available in the network and the number of neighbors that a network node directly connects to.     

A High-Throughput MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

One way to improve the throughput of a wireless ad hoc network at the media access (MAC) layer is to allow as much as possible concurrent transmissions among neighboring nodes. In this paper, we present a novel high-throughput MAC protocol, called Concurrent Transmission MAC(CTMAC), which supports concurrent transmission while allowing the network to have a simple design with a single channel, single transceiver, and single transmission power architecture. CTMAC inserts additional control gap between the transmission of control packets (RTS/CTS) and data packets (DATA/ACK), which allows a series of RTS/CTS exchanges to take place between the nodes in the vicinity of the transmitting or receiving node to schedule possible multiple, concurrent data transmissions. To safeguard the concurrent data transmission, collision avoidance information is included in the control packets and used by the neighboring nodes to determine whether they should begin their transmissions. Also, to isolate the possible interference between DATA packets and ACK packets, a new ACK sequence mechanism is proposed. Simulation results show that a significant gain in throughput can be obtained by the CTMAC protocol compared with the existing work including the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol.