Performance enhancement of mSCTP for vertical handover across heterogeneous wireless networks

In the mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) for vertical handover, a mobile user may suffer from performance degradation due to the problems of packet reordering and retransmission timeout and due to the packet loss during handover. To solve these problems, we propose a new scheme of handover retransmission for mSCTP handover, in which the correspondent node retransmits the outstanding data packets to the mobile node over the new primary path. From simulation results, it is shown that the proposed scheme can avoid the packet reordering and retransmission timeout problems during handover. Moreover, we can see that the proposed scheme can significantly improve throughput of mSCTP handover, compared with the existing schemes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Seamless session mobility scheme in heterogeneous wireless networks

The next generation wireless communication system will likely be heterogeneous networks, as various technologies can be integrated on heterogeneous networks. A mobile multiple‐mode device can easily access the Internet through different wireless interfaces. The mobile multiple‐mode device thus could switch to different access points to maintain the robustness of the connection when it can acquire more resources from other heterogeneous wireless networks. The mobile multiple‐mode device therefore needs to face the handover problem in such environment. This work introduces Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)‐based cross‐layer scheme to support seamless handover scheme over heterogeneous networks. The proposed scheme consists of a battery lifetime‐based handover policy and cross‐layer fast handover scheme, called the SIP‐based mobile stream control transmission protocol (SmSCTP). This work describes the major idea of the proposed scheme and infrastructure. The proposed scheme has been implemented in Linux system. The simulation and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SmSCTP scheme yields better signaling cost, hand‐off delay time, packet loss and delay jitter than SIP and mSCTP protocols. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Predictive mobility support for QoS provisioning in mobile wirelessenvironments

With the proliferation of wireless network technologies, mobile users are expected to demand the same quality of service (QoS) available to fixed users. This paper presents a predictive and adaptive scheme to support timed-QoS guarantees in pico- and micro-cellular environments. The proposed scheme integrates the mobility model into the service model to achieve efficient network resource utilization and avoid severe network congestion. The mobility model uses a probabilistic approach to determine the most likely cluster to be visited by the mobile unit. The admission control is invoked when a new call arrives or an existing call performs a handoff to verify the feasibility of supporting the call. The performance of the proposed schemes is compared to the shadow cluster scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme under different traffic patterns is also presented     

基于mSCTP的移动流媒体传输方案研究

多网络覆盖的无线网络环境下由于存在路径选择和切换等机制,对于移动流媒体的传输方案有更高的要求,mSCTP协议是在流媒体控制传输协议SCTP的基础上增加了动态地址配置特性,可在用户移动的同时进行IP地址的动态增加和删减,从而选择最佳的传输路径,现结合mSCTP的动态地址配置特性和SCTP本身具有的多宿特性,提出一种在用户慢移动状态下,针对点播模式的移动流媒体业务的优化传输方案,制定传输路径选择策略,在主路径满足业务要求前提下不进行不必要的路径性能测试与切换,并通过NS2仿真验证.     

基于mSCTP异构网络垂直切换性能优化方案

基于mSCTP,通过分析影响垂直切换性能的两个问题,即切换到新路径上的慢启动现象导致的吞吐量骤降,以及由于原无线信号的迅速衰减使得SACK丢失导致的多余重传,引入一种垂直切换性能优化的改良方案mSCTP-IPVHO。通过仿真表明,mSCTP-IPVHO能在一定程度上优化异构网络垂直切换性能。     

Predictive Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Available congestion control schemes, for example transport control protocol (TCP), when applied to wireless networks, result in a large number of packet drops, unfair scenarios and low throughputs with a significant amount of wasted energy due to retransmissions. To fully utilize the hop by hop feedback information, this paper presents a novel, decentralized, predictive congestion control (DPCC) for wireless sensor networks (WSN). The DPCC consists of an adaptive flow and adaptive back-off interval selection schemes that work in concert with energy efficient, distributed power control (DPC). The DPCC detects the onset of congestion using queue utilization and the embedded channel estimator algorithm in DPC that predicts the channel quality. Then, an adaptive flow control scheme selects suitable rate which is enforced by the newly proposed adaptive backoff interval selection scheme. An optional adaptive scheduling scheme updates weights associated with each packet to guarantee the weighted fairness during congestion. Closed-loop stability of the proposed hop-by-hop congestion control is demonstrated by using the Lyapunov-based approach. Simulation results show that the DPCC reduces congestion and improves performance over congestion detection and avoidance (CODA) [3] and IEEE 802.11 protocols.     

An end-to-end multipath smooth handoff scheme for stream media

Supporting transmission of stream media over wireless mobile networks is often difficult because packets may be lost due to the rerouting of packets during handoff, and also because bursts of packet loss may occur during handoff due to the disparity in the amount of available bandwidth among different cells. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multipath handoff scheme that provides smooth handoff for stream media in wireless networks with different amounts of available bandwidth from cell to cell. In the proposed scheme, multiple paths are established during handoff to reach a mobile destination node. The stream media sources are equipped with an adaptive multilayer encoder, and important layers in the encoded video stream are duplicated and transmitted over multiple paths during handoff. The effectiveness of the proposed multipath handoff scheme is verified and compared with existing schemes through extensive simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides higher throughput and better quality for stream media.     

Network-aware P2P file sharing over the wireless mobile networks

With the coming wireless mobile networks era and the popular use of P2P applications, how to improve the resource retrieval and discovery for P2P file sharing applications in wireless mobile networks becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a novel network-aware P2P file architecture and related control schemes that can provide continuous resource retrieval and discovery for mobile users over the wireless network environment. The proposed architecture divides a P2P file sharing network into multiple network-aware clusters, in which peers are assigned to a network-aware cluster using a network prefix division. Accordingly, there are two designs for supporting mobile peers to retrieve files in wireless mobile networks. First, a novel file discovery control scheme named mobility-aware file discovery control (MAFDC) scheme is devised to obtain fresh status of shared peers and find the new resource providing peers in wireless mobile networks. Second, a resource provider selection algorithm is devised to enable a mobile peer to select new resource providing peers for continuous file retrieval     

Corruption‐aware adaptive increase and adaptive decrease algorithm for TCP error and congestion controls in wireless networks

The conventional TCP tends to suffer from performance degradation due to packet corruptions in the wireless lossy channels, since any corruption event is regarded as an indication of network congestion. This paper proposes a TCP error and congestion control scheme using corruption‐aware adaptive increase and adaptive decrease algorithm to improve TCP performance over wireless networks. In the proposed scheme, the available network bandwidth is estimated based on the amount of the received integral data as well as the received corrupted data. The slow start threshold is updated only when a lost but not corrupted segment is detected by sender, since the corrupted packets still arrive at the TCP receiver. In the proposed scheme, the duplicated ACKs are processed differently by sender depending on whether there are any lost but not corrupted segments at present. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme could significantly improve TCP throughput over the heterogeneous wired and wireless networks with a high bit error rate, compared with the existing TCP and its variants. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improving TCP performance in mobile networks

In this letter, a new transport layer mechanism is proposed to improve the performance of transport control protocol (TCP) in mobile networks. The proposed mechanism is comprised of two parts: a loss classifier (LC) and a congestion window extrapolator (CWE). Based on LC, the cause of packet loss during roaming is determined. If the loss is considered to be caused by congestion in the wireline, the congestion window is halved; otherwise, the packet is considered to be lost in the last hop, the wireless portion, and the sender adjusts the size of the congestion window based on CWE. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism. The results show that our mechanism significantly improves TCP performance as compared with existing solutions for mobile networks.     

Agent-Based Forwarding Strategies for Reducing Location Management Cost in Mobile Networks

An important issue in location management for dealing with user mobility in wireless networks is to reduce the cost associated with location updates and searches. The former operation occurs when a mobile user moves to a new location registration area and the network is being informed of the mobile user's current location; the latter operation occurs when there is a call for the mobile user and the network must deliver the call to the mobile user. In this paper, we propose and analyze a class of new agent-based forwarding schemes with the objective to reduce the location management cost in mobile wireless networks. We develop analytical models to compare the performance of the proposed schemes with existing location management schemes to demonstrate their feasibility and also to reveal conditions under which our proposed schemes are superior to existing ones. Our proposed schemes are particularly suitable for mobile networks with switches which can cover a large number of location registration areas.     

A study of multicast congestion control for UMTS

In this paper, we study the applicability of multicast congestion control over universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) networks. We analyze two well‐known multicast congestion control schemes for fixed networks, namely TCP‐friendly multicast congestion control and pragmatic general multicast congestion control. We investigate their behavior when they are employed in UMTS networks and we analyze the problems arose when these mechanisms are applied over the wireless links of the UMTS terrestrial radio‐access network. Additionally, we propose necessary improvements to these legacy schemes and explain the necessity of these modifications. The proposed schemes are implemented in the ns‐2 network simulator and are evaluated under various network conditions and topologies. Finally, we measure the performance of the proposed modified schemes and compare them with the corresponding legacy mechanisms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Adaptive Partial FCS Scheme to Enable the Corruption-aware Transport Protocols over IP Networks for Fourth Generation Wireless Communications

The traditional reliable transport protocols are originally designed for the wired networks, which regard any packet loss as the indication of network congestion and halve their congestion windows to alleviate the traffic overload of network. However, unlike in wired networks, non-congestion losses will severely degrade the performance of traditional transport protocols in wireless networks. Thus some corruption-aware transport protocols have been proposed to overcome the performance degradation caused in the error-prone wireless networks. Unfortunately, the corruption-aware transport protocols cannot work in realistic networks up to now since the corrupted packets will be discarded by the link layer checksum mechanisms before they are delivered to the transport layer. This paper introduces a cross-layer adaptive partial Frame Check Sequence scheme to safely enable the corruption-aware transport protocols in the next generation wireless communications without disabling the link layer 32-bit Cyclic Redundancy Check checksum mechanisms. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can help the corruption-aware transport protocols to significantly improve their performance compared to that of the existing schemes.     

An End-To-End Approach for Transparent Mobility Across Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

With the advent of a myriad of wireless networking technologies, a mobile host today can potentially be equipped with multiple wireless interfaces that have access to different wireless networks. It is widely perceived that future generation wireless networks will exhibit a similar trend in supporting a large variety of heterogeneous wireless access technologies that a mobile host can choose from. In this paper, we consider such a multi-homed mobile host and propose an end-to-end solution that enables the seamless use of heterogeneous wireless access technologies. The unique features of the proposed solution include: (i) a purely end-to-end approach to handle host mobility that requires no support from the underlying network infrastructure, (ii) seamless vertical handoffs when the mobile host migrates from one access network to another, (iii) ability to support different congestion control schemes for a live connection traversing different interfaces, and (iv) effective bandwidth aggregation when the mobile host has simultaneous access to multiple networks. We present the design and details of the proposed approach, and evaluate its performance through simulations and real-life field experiments.     

A Smooth Handover Scheme for Fast-Moving Users in Mobile IPv6 Networks

As the rapid development of wireless technologies and increasing communication need of people in ubiquitous environment, some handover schemes and improvements were proposed by the IETF in order to support mobility effectively. In addition, mobile Stream Control Transmission Protocol (mSCTP) proposed by the IETF is a new transport protocol supporting mobility and with a built-in feature called Multi-homing has attracted much attention from the research communities. Multi-homing is convenient to introduce IP diversity in mobility management. A seamless handover architecture called SIGMA based on mSCTP has better performance than Mobile IPv6 enhancements. However, the handover performance in SIGMA remains low if the mobile host moves at a fast speed. Aiming at this problem, we propose SHSBM, a Smooth Handover Scheme based-on mSCTP. SHSBM adopts the advantage of SIGMA, and utilize Buffer and Tunnel to better serve fast-moving users. Additionally, we propose two strategies to solve the problem caused by Buffer-scheme—sequence Out of Order. Criteria for performance evaluation including the packets’ loss rate, throughput and handover latency compared with SIGMA and Mobile IPv6 enhancements.     

Long-term rate control for concurrent multipath real-time video transmission in heterogeneous wireless networks

Concurrent multipath transmission provides an effective solution for streaming high-quality mobile videos in heterogeneous wireless networks. Rate control is commonly adopted in multimedia communication systems to fully utilize the available network bandwidth. This paper proposes a novel rate control for concurrent multipath video transmission. The existing rate control algorithms mainly adapt bit rate in the short-term pattern, i.e., without considering the long-term video transmission quality. We propose a long-term rate control scheme that takes into account the status of both the transmission buffer and video frames. First, a mathematical model is developed to formulate the non-convex problem of long-term quality maximization. Second, we develop a dynamic programming solution for online encoding bit rate control based on buffer status. The performance evaluation is conducted in a real test bed over LTE and Wi-Fi networks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed long-term rate control scheme achieves appreciable improvements over the short-term rate control schemes in terms of video quality and delay performance.     

Cross-layer congestion control in ad hoc wireless networks

The paper presents the problem of performance degradation of transport layer protocols due to congestion of wireless local area networks. Following the analysis of available solutions to this problem, a cross-layer congestion avoidance scheme (C³TCP) is presented, able to obtain higher performance by gathering capacity information such as bandwidth and delay at the link layer. The method requires the introduction of an additional module within the protocol stack of the mobile node, able to adjust the outgoing data stream based on capacity measurements. Moreover, a proposal to provide optional field support to existing IEEE 802.11 protocol, in order to support the presented congestion control solution as well as many other similar approaches, is presented. Achieved results underline good agreement with design considerations and high utilization of the available resources.     

Low-latency mobile IP handoff for infrastructure-mode wireless LANs

The increasing popularity of IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (LANs) lends them credibility as a viable alternative to third-generation (3G) wireless technologies. Even though wireless LANs support much higher channel bandwidth than 3G networks, their network-layer handoff latency is still too high to be usable for interactive multimedia applications such as voice over IP or video streaming. Specifically, the peculiarities of commercially available IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN hardware prevent existing mobile Internet protocol (IP) implementations from achieving subsecond Mobile IP handoff latency when the wireless LANs are operating in the infrastructure mode, which is also the prevailing operating mode used in most deployed IEEE 802.11b LANs. In this paper, we propose a low-latency mobile IP handoff scheme that can reduce the handoff latency of infrastructure-mode wireless LANs to less than 100 ms, the fastest known handoff performance for such networks. The proposed scheme overcomes the inability of mobility software to sense the signal strengths of multiple-access points when operating in an infrastructure-mode wireless LAN. It expedites link-layer handoff detection and speeds up network-layer handoff by replaying cached foreign agent advertisements. The proposed scheme strictly adheres to the mobile IP standard specification, and does not require any modifications to existing mobile IP implementations. That is, the proposed mechanism is completely transparent to the existing mobile IP software installed on mobile nodes and wired nodes. As a demonstration of this technology, we show how this low-latency handoff scheme together with a wireless LAN bandwidth guarantee mechanism supports undisrupted playback of remote video streams on mobile stations that are traveling across wireless LAN segments.     

Improving quality of service in WiMAX communication at vehicular speeds: a new call admission control solution

Call admission control (CAC) scheme serves as a useful tool for the WiMAX technology, which ensures that resources are not overcommitted and thereby, all existing connections enjoy guaranteed quality of service (QoS). CAC schemes largely rely on readily available information like currently available resources and bandwidth demand of the new call while making an acceptance or rejection decision once a new request arrives. Since wireless channels are not as reliable as wired communication, CAC scheme in WiMAX communication faces a serious challenge of making a right estimate of the usable channel capacity (i.e., effective throughput capacity) while computing the available resources in various communication scenarios. Existing CAC schemes do not consider the impact of mobility at vehicular speeds when computing the usable link capacity and available resources. The main limitation of such CAC scheme is that when a mobile node moves at a slower speed and makes a connection request to the base station (BS), the BS evaluates the situation based on the currently available information. The BS in such cases, is short‐sighted and often overestimates the available resources as it completely ignores the scenario when the SS reaches its top speed within a very short time after a CAC decision is made, causing a significant drop in usable throughput. In this paper, we address this limitation of existing WiMAX CAC schemes and propose a new CAC scheme that estimates the usable link capacity for WiMAX communication at vehicular speeds and uses this information while making a CAC decision. We also present a CAC scheme that takes the speed distribution model of a mobile node into account during the CAC decision making process. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme achieves lower dropping rate and improved QoS compared to existing schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A-MAC: Adaptive Medium Access Control for Next Generation Wireless Terminals

Next generation (NG) wireless networks are envisioned to provide high bandwidth to mobile users via bandwidth aggregation over heterogeneous wireless architectures. NG wireless networks, however, impose challenges due to their architectural heterogeneity in terms of different access schemes, resource allocation techniques as well as diverse quality of service requirements. These heterogeneities must be captured and handled dynamically as mobile terminals roam between different wireless architectures. However, to address these challenges, the existing proposals require either a significant modification in the network structure and in base stations or a completely new architecture, which lead to integration problems in terms of implementation costs, scalability and backward compatibility. Thus, the integration of the existing medium access schemes, e.g., CSMA, TDMA and CDMA, dictates an adaptive and seamless medium access control (MAC) layer that can achieve high network utilization and meet diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, an adaptive medium access control (A-MAC) layer is proposed to address the heterogeneities posed by the NG wireless networks. A-MAC introduces a two-layered MAC framework that accomplishes the adaptivity to both architectural heterogeneities and diverse QoS requirements. A novel virtual cube concept is introduced as a unified metric to model heterogeneous access schemes and capture their behavior. Based on the virtual cube concept, A-MAC provides architecture-independent decision and QoS based scheduling algorithms for efficient multi-network access. A-MAC performs seamless medium access to multiple networks without requiring any additional modifications in the existing network structures. It is shown via extensive simulations that A-MAC provides adaptivity to the heterogeneities in NG wireless networks and achieves high performance.