Evaluation of the masked node problem in ad hoc wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11 wireless networks employ the so-called RTS/CTS mechanism in order to avoid data packet collisions. The main design assumption is that all the nodes in the vicinity of a sender and a receiver will hear the RTS or CTS packets, and defer their transmission appropriately. This assumption happens to not hold, in general, even under perfect operating conditions. Often, neighboring nodes are "masked" by other ongoing transmissions nearby and, hence, are unable to receive the RTS or CTS packets correctly. We refer to such nodes as masked nodes. In this paper, we describe the masked node problem and show scenarios leading to data packet collisions. We evaluate the impact of masked nodes through mathematical analysis and real experiments on a small IEEE 802.11 ad hoc network. The analytical and experimental data closely match and reveal that the presence of a masked node in a network can result in an order of magnitude increase in data packet loss compared to a network without masked nodes. These results are further validated by extensive simulations on a large-scale network, which show that masked nodes also significantly affect delay and throughput performance. Therefore, masked nodes severely limit the effectiveness of the RTS/CTS mechanism in preventing performance degradation in wireless LANs.     

The slow start power controlled MAC protocol for mobile ad hoc networks and its performance analysis

We propose and evaluate the performance of a new MAC-layer protocol for mobile ad hoc networks, called the Slow Start Power Controlled (abbreviated SSPC) protocol. SSPC improves on IEEE 802.11 by using power control for the RTS/CTS and DATA frame transmissions, so as to reduce energy consumption and increase network throughput and lifetime. In our scheme the transmission power used for the RTS frames is not constant, but follows a slow start principle. The CTS frames, which are sent at maximum transmission power, prevent the neighbouring nodes from transmitting their DATA frames at power levels higher than a computed threshold, while allowing them to transmit at power levels less than that threshold. Reduced energy consumption is achieved by adjusting the node transmission power to the minimum required value for reliable reception at the receiving node, while increase in network throughput is achieved by allowing more transmissions to take place simultaneously. The slow start principle used for calculating the appropriate DATA frames transmission power and the possibility of more simultaneous collision-free transmissions differentiate the SSPC protocol from the other MAC solutions proposed for IEEE 802.11. Simulation results indicate that the SSPC protocol achieves a significant reduction in power consumption, average packet delay and frequency of RTS frame collisions, and a significant increase in network throughput and received-to-sent packets ratio compared to IEEE 802.11 protocol.     

A combined approach for detecting hidden nodes in 802.11 wireless LANs

Hidden node is a fundamental problem that severely degrades the performance of wireless networks. The problem occurs when nodes that do not hear each other transmit at the same time, which leads to data packet collision. IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) tries to solve this problem through the Request to Send/Clear to Send (RTS/CTS) mechanism. However, the mechanism is not wholly successful. The RTS/CTS idea is based on the assumption that all nodes in the vicinity of Access Points will hear CTS packets and consequently defer their transmissions. The shortcoming of RTS/CTS stems from the fact that such packets introduce high overhead if extensively used. In this article, we propose a hybrid approach for detecting hidden nodes in 802.11 WLANs. The approach is mainly based on adaptive learning about collisions in the network. We think that the approach will be useful for controlling the tuning of RTS/CTS threshold and therefore reduce the overhead those packets introduce. Detailed simulation experiments have shown the strength of the proposed approach compared with other approaches.     

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.     

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

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

Improving protocol capacity for UDP/TCP traffic with model-based frame scheduling in IEEE 802.11-operated WLANs

In this paper, we develop a model-based frame scheduling scheme, called MFS, to enhance the capacity of IEEE 802.11-operated wireless local area networks (WLANs) for both transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) traffic. In MFS each node estimates the current network status by keeping track of the number of collisions it encounters between its two consecutive successful frame transmissions, and computes accordingly the current network utilization. The result is then used to determine a scheduling delay to be introduced before a node attempts to transmit its pending frame. MFS does not require any change in IEEE 802.11, but instead lays a thin layer between the LL and medium access control (MAC) layers. In order to accurately calculate the current utilization in WLANs, we develop an analytical model that characterizes data transmission activities in IEEE 802.11-operated WLANs with/without the request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) mechanism, and validate the model with ns-2 simulation. All the control overhead incurred in the physical and MAC layers, as well as system parameters specified in IEEE 802.11, are figured in. We conduct a comprehensive simulation study to evaluate MFS in perspective of the number of collisions, achievable throughput, intertransmission delay, and fairness in the cases of TCP and UDP traffic. The simulation results indicate that the performance improvement with respect to the protocol capacity in a WLAN of up to 300 nodes is 1) as high as 20% with the RTS/CTS and 70% without the RTS/CTS in the case of UDP traffic and 2) as high as 10% with the RTS/CTS and 40% without the RTS/CTS in the case of TCP traffic. Moreover, the intertransmission delay in MFS is smaller and exhibits less variation than that in IEEE 802.11; the fairness among wireless nodes in MFS is better than, or equal to, that in IEEE 802.11.     

Effectiveness of RTS/CTS handshake in IEEE 802.11 based ad hoc networks

IEEE 802.11 MAC mainly relies on two techniques to combat interference: physical carrier sensing and RTS/CTS handshake (also known as “virtual carrier sensing”). Ideally, the RTS/CTS handshake can eliminate most interference. However, the effectiveness of RTS/CTS handshake is based on the assumption that hidden nodes are within transmission range of receivers. In this paper, we prove using analytic models that in ad hoc networks, such an assumption cannot hold due to the fact that power needed for interrupting a packet reception is much lower than that of delivering a packet successfully. Thus, the “virtual carrier sensing” implemented by RTS/CTS handshake cannot prevent all interference as we expect in theory. Physical carrier sensing can complement this in some degree. However, since interference happens at receivers, while physical carrier sensing is detecting transmitters (the same problem causing the hidden terminal situation), physical carrier sensing cannot help much, unless a very large carrier sensing range is adopted, which is limited by the antenna sensitivity. In this paper, we investigate how effective is the RTS/CTS handshake in terms of reducing interference. We show that in some situations, the interference range is much larger than transmission range, where RTS/CTS cannot function well. Two independent solutions are proposed in this paper. One is a simple enhancement to the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The other is to utilize directional antennas. Simulation results verify that the proposed schemes indeed can help IEEE 802.11 resolve most interference caused by large interference range.     

An energy-efficient MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11 in wireless ad hoc networks

Energy efficiency is a measure of the performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless multihop ad hoc networks. The IEEE 802.11 standard, currently used in wireless multihop ad hoc networks, wastes bandwidth capacity and energy resources because of many collisions. Therefore, controlling the contention window size at a given node will increase not only the operating life of the battery but also the overall system capacity. It is essential to develop effective backoff schemes for saving power in IEEE 802.11 wireless multihop ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient backoff scheme and evaluate its performance in an ad hoc network. Our contention window mechanism devised by us grants a node access to a channel on the basis of the node’s percentage of residual energy. We use both an analytical model and simulation experiments to evaluate the effective performance of our scheme in an ad hoc network. Our extensive ns-2-based simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme provides excellent performance in terms of energy goodput, end-to-end goodput, and packet delivery ratio, as well as the end-to-end delay.     

The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function in Small-Scale Ad-Hoc Wireless LANs

The IEEE 802.11 standards for wireless local area networks define how the stations of an ad-hoc wireless network coordinate in order to share the medium efficiently. This work investigates the performance of such a network by considering the two different access mechanisms proposed in these standards. The IEEE 802.11 access mechanisms are based on the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol using a binary slotted exponential backoff mechanism. The basic CSMA/CA mechanism uses an acknowledgment message at the end of each transmitted packet, whereas the request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) CSMA/CA mechanism also uses a RTS/CTS message exchange before transmitting a packet. In this work, we analyze these two access mechanisms in terms of throughput and delay. Extensive numerical results are presented to highlight the characteristics of each access mechanism and to define the dependence of each mechanism on the backoff procedure parameters.     

A novel hidden station detection mechanism in IEEE 802.11 WLAN

The popular IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is based on a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), where a station listens to the medium before transmission in order to avoid collision. If there exist stations which can not hear each other, i.e., hidden stations, the potential collision probability increases, thus dramatically degrading the network throughput. The RTS/CTS (request-to-send/clear-to-send) frame exchange is a solution for the hidden station problem, but the RTS/CTS exchange itself consumes the network resources by transmitting the control frames. In order to maximize the network throughput, we need to use the RTS/CTS exchange adaptively only when hidden stations exist in the network. In this letter, a simple but very effective hidden station detection mechanism is proposed. Once a station detects the hidden stations via the proposed detection mechanism, it can trigger the usage of the RTS/CTS exchange. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can provide the maximum system throughput performance.     

A distributed transmission power control protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive solution for power control in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our solution emphasizes the interplay between the MAC and network layers, whereby the MAC layer indirectly influences the selection of the next-hop by properly adjusting the power of route request packets. This is done while maintaining network connectivity. Channel-gain information obtained mainly from overheard RTS and CTS packets is used to dynamically construct the network topology. Unlike the IEEE 802.11 approach and previously proposed schemes, ours does not use the RTS/CTS packets to silence the neighboring nodes. Instead, collision avoidance information is inserted in the CTS packets and sent over an out-of-band control channel. This information is used to dynamically bound the transmission power of potentially interfering nodes in the vicinity of a receiver. By properly estimating the required transmission power for data packets, our protocol allows for interference-limited simultaneous transmissions to take place in the neighborhood of a receiving node. Simulation results indicate that, compared to the IEEE 802.11 approach, the proposed protocol achieves a significant increase in the channel utilization and end-to-end network throughput and a significant decrease in the total energy consumption.     

Collision-aware design of rate adaptation for multi-rate 802.11 WLANs

One of the key challenges in designing a rate adaptation scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs) is to differentiate bit errors from link-layer collisions. Many recent rate adaptation schemes adopt the RTS/CTS mechanism to prevent collision losses from triggering unnecessary rate decrease. However, the RTS/CTS handshake incurs significant overhead and is rarely activated in today's infrastructure WLANs. In this paper we propose a new rate adaptation scheme that mitigates the collision effect on the operation of rate adaptation. In contrast to previous approaches adopting fixed rate-increasing and decreasing thresholds, our scheme varies threshold values based on the measured network status. Using the "retry" information in 802.11 MAC headers as feedback, we enable the transmitter to gauge current network state. The proposed rate adaptation scheme does not require additional probing overhead incurred by RTS/CTS exchanges and can be easily deployed without changes in firmware. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by comparing with existing approaches through extensive simulations.     

Achieving performance enhancement in IEEE 802.11 WLANs by using the DIDD backoff mechanism

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standards have been widely implemented mainly because of their easy deployment and low cost. The IEEE 802.11 collision avoidance procedures utilize the binary exponential backoff (BEB) scheme that reduces the collision probability by doubling the contention window after a packet collision. In this paper, we propose an easy‐to‐implement and effective contention window‐resetting scheme, called double increment double decrement (DIDD), in order to enhance the performance of IEEE 802.11 WLANs. DIDD is simple, fully compatible with IEEE 802.11 and does not require any estimation of the number of contending wireless stations. We develop an alternative mathematical analysis for the proposed DIDD scheme that is based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi‐dimensional Markov chains that have been extensively utilized in the literature. We carry out a detailed performance study and we identify the improvement of DIDD comparing to the legacy BEB for both basic access and request‐to‐send/clear‐to‐send (RTS/CTS) medium access mechanisms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance analysis of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordinationfunction

The IEEE has standardized the 802.11 protocol for wireless local area networks. The primary medium access control (MAC) technique of 802.11 is called the distributed coordination function (DCF). The DCF is a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme with binary slotted exponential backoff. This paper provides a simple, but nevertheless extremely accurate, analytical model to compute the 802.11 DCF throughput, in the assumption of finite number of terminals and ideal channel conditions. The proposed analysis applies to both the packet transmission schemes employed by DCF, namely, the basic access and the RTS/CTS access mechanisms. In addition, it also applies to a combination of the two schemes, in which packets longer than a given threshold are transmitted according to the RTS/CTS mechanism. By means of the proposed model, we provide an extensive throughput performance evaluation of both access mechanisms of the 802.11 protocol     

一种联合路由层信息设计的多跳Ad Hoc MAC层协议

提出了一种单信道多跳Ad Hoc网络的媒体接入层协议.利用全向天线的特点,协议控制帧捎带路由信息,使邻居节点获知节点间路由状态.上游节点的ACK应答直接触发下游节点的CTS握手,形成CTS/DATA/ACK三维交互机制.协议可有效减少网络的握手开销,降低重负载时握手帧的冲突概率.仿真表明,协议可适应不同的拓扑.最好情况下,协议较IEEE 802.11协议的吞吐量约提升16.1%,端到端延时约降低16.8%.改善了多跳Ad Hoc网络性能.     

一种用于无线自组织网络的并发传输MAC协议

本文提出一种工作在单信道、单发射器和单发射功率模式下的并发传输MAC协议.该协议在控制报文(RTS/CTS)和数据报文(DADA/ACK)之间插入附加控制时隙,以便相邻节点有机会交换自己的控制报文.为了保证并发传输的可靠性,协议在控制报文中包含了冲突避免信息,邻居节点根据这些信息判断自己的传输能否在不影响已有传输的情况下并发进行.模拟结果显示,与IEEE 802.11相比,CTMAC协议在网络中存在并发可能时,使系统吞吐量得到很大提高.     

基于双忙音的多址接入协议的研究

在Ad Hoc网络中．隐藏终端和暴露终端的存在严重影响了网络的通信能力。双忙音多址接入（DBTMA）协议是采用RTS／CTS对话机制来预约信道，通过引入两个窄带带外忙音信号来避免分组间冲突，解决了隐藏终端和暴露终端问题。本文在两个方面进一步对DBTMA进行改进：第一，使用一个控制分组RTS来预约信道，通过目的节点所发接收忙音来响应RTS分组；第二，采用时隙ALOHA协议对RTS分组进行传输，通过改进，提高了控制分组成功传输的概率，经仿真研究分析表明，提高了网络的吞吐量，增强了网络性能。     

Space and network diversity combination for masked node collision resolution in wireless ad hoc network

In wireless ad hoc networks, the traditional carrier sensing multiple access/collision avoidance protocol cannot solve the masked node problem, which affects the network performance greatly. Our proposed collision separation technique overcomes the shortcoming of the IEEE 802.11 request-to-send-clear-to-send handshake by combining the space diversity provided by the antenna array and network diversity provided by the medium access control layer. In this work, the colliding packets caused by masked nodes are not discarded but stored and combined with the selected retransmission packets to separate the data from different nodes. The steady states of the nodes in the network are analyzed via a Markov chain model. The network throughput and delay performance are also investigated. Compared to network assisted diversity multiple access, our proposed method can provide significantly higher throughput and lower delay     

A weighted fairness guarantee scheme based on node cooperation for multimedia WLAN mesh networks

In this paper, we focus on weighted fairness in multimedia WLAN mesh networks. Based on the analysis of the fairness problem of IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) scheme in WLAN mesh networks, we propose a weighted fairness guarantee scheme (WFGS), which provides weighted fairness for multimedia flows with different QoS requirements through node cooperation. WFGS piggybacks extra field in RTS/CTS frames to declare the channel occupation ratio of each flow. Accordingly, the transmitters can get the neighboring flows’ channel occupation ratio via overhearing the RTS/CTS frames from its neighbors, and cooperatively adjust the contention window size to achieve weighted fairness among the flows. Also, to reliably reserve transmissions, an adaptive power control based RTS/CTS handshake mechanism is introduced. Simulation results show that compared with EDCA scheme, WFGS can effectively resolve the collisions induced by the carrier interference and thereby guarantee both the short-term and long-term weighted fairness among multimedia flows.     

Mitigating false blocking problem in wireless ad hoc networks

The traditional IEEE802.11 Request-to-Send/Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) handshaking in medium access control layer has been widely adopted in wireless ad hoc networks to reduce the hidden node problem. However, it induces the false blocking problem, which occurs when nodes are prevented from replying to any incoming RTS packets when they are in deferring state after overhearing the RTS and/or CTS packets. Worse still, these unreplied RTS packets will then cause other neighbouring nodes to defer blindly which propagates the false blocking problem, resulting in exhaustion of scarce energy resource and throughput degradation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Ready-to-Send and blocking notification (RSBN) scheme to mitigate the false blocking problem. The adaptive RSBN scheme not only validates the overheard RTS packets to avoid blind deferment but also informs neighbouring nodes of the nodes’ deferring status to block unnecessary RTS packets. We validate the proposed scheme by simulations and the results have shown that the adaptive RSBN scheme can achieve higher performance.