Dynamic bandwidth management in IEEE 802.11-based multihop wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a new protocol named dynamic regulation of best-effort traffic (DRBT) which supports quality of service (QoS) throughput guarantees and provides a distributed regulation mechanism for best-effort traffic in multihop wireless networks. By adapting dynamically the rate of best-effort traffic at the link layer, DRBT increases the acceptance ratio of QoS flows and provides a good use of the remaining resources through the network. Our protocol also provides an accurate method to evaluate the available bandwidth in IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks which is able to differentiate QoS applications from best-effort traffic. Through extensive simulations, we compare the performance of our proposal scheme with some others protocols like QoS protocol for ad hoc real-time traffic for instance.     

Integrated management architecture for IP-based networks

IP telephony will bring about a dramatic change in the way IP services are planned, provisioned, managed, and billed. In order to build and retain a strong customer base for these new services, service providers need to meet, if not exceed, the customer expectations set by today's traditional voice services. Acceptance of IP telephony will depend on the quality and efficiency with which service providers offer, deliver, and manage IP services. Installation, configuration, and activation must be rapid and error-free. Furthermore, customers will want direct control over the reconfiguration of services and real-time visibility into the impact change has on their operating costs. Once the service is activated, customers will want the provider to guarantee service quality as defined by industry standards. Corporate customers in particular will need to be assured that the provider is proactively monitoring performance to avoid problems and providing them visibility into the performance data collected. This article discusses an integrated management support system for IP-based networks illustrating the functions needed to support the unique challenges of managing VoIP services. An example of a service management system is also described     

High-performance microprocessor architectures

Over the past few years, microprocessor designs have undergone an evolution process shaped largely by improvements in LSI circuit technology and experiences gained from the very large user community. By and large, most microprocessors have internal architectures that are patterned after classical CPU structures. This trend is changing rapidly. High-performance LSI microprocessors are emerging at a slow but steady pace, with architectural features borrowed from larger and more powerful computers. This paper examines aspects of pipelined concurrency and microprogramming as applied to LSI microprocessors, for the purpose of enhancing performance.     

Architectures for IP-based network-assisted mobility management across heterogeneous networks [architectures and protocols for mobility management in all-IP mobile networks]

In this article new architectures for network- assisted management of vertical handovers are proposed, relying on IP-based protocols, aiming at achieving the most relevant intersystem mobility decision with respect to user satisfaction and operator added value. The key design principle used is ease of deployment, with flexible hierarchical handover decision entities allowing the distribution of the decision process across local and global levels. The decision itself relies on a broad set of parameters at the radio, networking, application, user preferences, and operator policies levels. The advantage of the approach is highlighted in the specific cellular/WLAN scenario, and a proof-of-concept testbed has enabled to validate it. Standardization in this area is currently ongoing in 3GPP, IEEE, and IETF.     

Admission-control policies for multihop wireless networks

In this paper, we investigate the admission-control problem for voice traffic in fixed-route circuit-switched wireless networks. We consider coordinate-convex admission-control policies and a blocked-calls-cleared mode of operation, in conjunction with the usual assumptions on the voice process statistics. These conditions result in a product-form stationary distribution for the voice state of the system, which facilitates the evaluation of network performance. However, to determine the optimal policy a large state space must be searched. We develop a recursive procedure to accelerate the evaluation of a large number of different admission-control policies, and a descent-search method to reduce significantly the number of policies that must be evaluated in searching for the optimal one. The numerical examples we present indicate that reduced blocking probability (or increased throughput) can be obtained by administering active admission control. The degree of improvement is highest in moderately overloaded traffic conditions, but it is typically small in low-capacity networks (at all loads). However, in applications where the performance measure associates different revenues or costs with the various call types, considerable improvement can be obtained when admission control is used.     

ITU-T QoS standards for IP-based networks

To support IP/PSTN convergence, future IP networks will need to provide reliable differentiated QoS to a diverse set of user applications, including telephony. To achieve end-to-end QoS solutions, IP network providers will need to agree on a common set of IP packet transfer performance parameters and QoS objectives. This article describes two new ITU-T Recommendations, Y.1540 and Y.1541, that document such an agreement.     

Scheduling algorithms for multihop radio networks

Algorithms for transmission scheduling in multihop broadcast radio networks are presented. Both link scheduling and broadcast scheduling are considered. In each instance, scheduling algorithms are given that improve upon existing algorithms both theoretically and experimentally. It is shown that tree networks can be scheduled optimally and that arbitrary networks can be scheduled so that the schedule is bounded by a length that is proportional to a function of the network thickness times the optimum. Previous algorithms could guarantee only that the schedules were bounded by a length no worse than the maximum node degree times optimum. Since the thickness is typically several orders of magnitude less than the maximum node degree, the algorithms presented represent a considerable theoretical improvement. Experimentally, a realistic model of a radio network is given and the performance of the new algorithms is studied. These results show that, for both types of scheduling, the new algorithms (experimentally) perform consistently better than earlier methods     

Cooperative multihop broadcast for wireless networks

We address the minimum-energy broadcast problem under the assumption that nodes beyond the nominal range of a transmitter can collect the energy of unreliably received overheard signals. As a message is forwarded through the network, a node will have multiple opportunities to reliably receive the message by collecting energy during each retransmission. We refer to this cooperative strategy as accumulative broadcast. We seek to employ accumulative broadcast in a large scale loosely synchronized, low-power network. Therefore, we focus on distributed network layer approaches for accumulative broadcast in which loosely synchronized nodes use only local information. To further simplify the system architecture, we assume that nodes forward only reliably decoded messages. Under these assumptions, we formulate the minimum-energy accumulative broadcast problem. We present a solution employing two subproblems. First, we identify the ordering in which nodes should transmit. Second, we determine the optimum power levels for that ordering. While the second subproblem can be solved by means of linear programming, the ordering subproblem is found to be NP-complete. We devise a heuristic algorithm to find a good ordering. Simulation results show the performance of the algorithm to be close to optimum and a significant improvement over the well known BIP algorithm for constructing energy-efficient broadcast trees. We then formulate a distributed version of the accumulative broadcast algorithm that uses only local information at the nodes and has performance close to its centralized counterpart.     

A delay‐based transport layer mechanism for fair TCP throughput over 802.11 multihop wireless mesh networks

Cities worldwide have planned and implemented large‐scale wireless mesh network (WMN) deployments. These mesh deployments are expected to provide broadband mobile access to the Internet at a low cost to the user. This paper considers the fairness problem affecting nodes in multihop WMNs. Many existing approaches to coping with the fairness problem are unsuitable because they necessitate modifications to the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol or node queueing operations. Such modifications require a change in hardware/firmware at every node in the WMN. Thus, these approaches are less favorable from the points of view of interoperability and cost. Without modifying the lower layer protocols, this study identifies TCP parameters that impact throughput fairness and proposes an adjustment to these parameters to reduce frame collisions and to improve throughput fairness. Using simple mathematical formulations and ns2 simulations, this study shows that the frame transmissions from each node can be effectively controlled by properly controlling the delayed ACK timer and by using a suitable advertised window. The proposed method, in addition to fairness, requires fewer buffer resources than other methods. Moreover, it is not sensitive to the carrier sense range. It is also simple and easy to deploy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quality-of-service signaling for next-generation IP-based mobile networks

We present a novel end-to-end QoS architecture that enables seamless services over heterogeneous wireless access networks. We discuss the main architectural approaches and design issues of mobility-aware QoS signaling in IP networks. Then we introduce a QoS signaling architecture that integrates resource management with mobility management. It is based on a domain resource manager concept and nicely supports various handover types in an integrated approach. In particular, we support anticipated handover with pre-reservation of resources over the old network before the mobile node is attached to the new access point.     

IP-based access networks for broadband multimedia services

The increasing demands of new services and applications are pushing for drastic changes in the design of access networks for residential and SOHO users. Future access networks will provide full service integration, resource sharing at the packet level, and QoS support. It is expected that using IP as the base technology, the ideal plug-and-play scenario, where the management actions of the access network operator are kept to a minimum, will be achieved easily. In this article we start by giving a historical perspective of the evolution of access networks. We then describe an IP-based architecture targeted for integrated support of broadband multimedia services, designed to be low-cost and easily manageable. We illustrate the different phases of a multimedia Internet access session, when using SIP for session initiation, COPS and DIAMETER for QoS policy management, and AAA and RSVP for resource reservation.     

Logically rearrangeable multihop lightwave networks

The optimization problem of rearrangeable multihop lightwave networks is considered. The authors formulate the flow and wavelength assignment problem, when minimizing the maximum flow in the network, as a mixed integer optimization problem subject to linear constraints. The problem is decomposed into two independent subproblems, the wavelength assignment (or connectivity problem) and the flow assignment (or routing problem). A simple heuristic provides a meaningful formulation to the connectivity problem, in a form similar to a transportation problem. An algorithm is then proposed which finds a heuristic initial logical connectivity diagram and the corresponding routing, and then iterates from that solution by applying branch-exchange operations to the connectivity diagram. The algorithm was tested on illustrative traffic matrices for an 8 node network with two transmitters and two receivers per node, and an improvement in achievable throughput over the Perfect Shuffle interconnection pattern was shown in all cases     

Topology control for multihop packet radio networks

A distributed topology-control algorithm has been developed for each node in a packet radio network (PRN) to control its transmitting power and logical neighbors for a reliable high-throughput topology. The algorithm first constructs a planar triangulation from locations of all nodes as a starting topology. Then, the minimum angles of all triangles in the planar triangulation are maximized by means of edge switching to improve connectivity and throughput. The resulting triangulation at this stage, the Delaunay triangulation, can be determined locally at each node. The topology is modified by negotiating among neighbors to satisfy a design requirement on the nodal degree parameter. Simulations show that the final topology is degree-bounded, has a rather regular and uniform structure, and has throughput and reliability that are greater than that of a number of alternative topologies     

Distributed cooperative MAC for multihop wireless networks

This article investigates distributed cooperative medium access control protocol design for multihop wireless networks. Cooperative communication has been proposed recently as an effective way to mitigate channel impairments. With cooperation, single-antenna mobile terminals in a multi-user environment share antennas from other mobiles to generate a virtual multipleantenna system that achieves more reliable communication with a higher diversity gain. However, more mobiles conscribed for one communication inevitably induces complex medium access interactions, especially in multihop wireless ad hoc networks. To improve the network throughput and diversity gain simultaneously, we investigate the issues and challenges in designing an efficient MAC scheme for such networks. Furthermore, based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF, a cross-layer designed cooperative MAC protocol is proposed. The MAC scheme adapts to the channel condition and payload length.     

各种用于IEEE 802.11b WLAN应用的前端体系架构

随着WLAN芯片组供应商提供的芯片实现高集成化,对于设计者来说,在WLAN产品中余下的、能用来让产品展示其与众不同之处的关键部位尚有几处,其中一处就是前端体系架构。诸如发射输出功率、电流消耗、接收灵敏度、镜像和寄生干扰抑制、材料清单成本(BOM)和占用面积等各类参数,都决定了消费者对WLAN产品的体验,并且这些参数的关键影响因素就是所选用的前端电路的体系架构。     

Novel self-configurable positioning technique for multihop wireless networks

Geographic location information can effectively improve the performance (e.g., in routing or intelligent coordination) of large wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel self-configurable positioning technique for multihop wireless networks, based on a Euclidean distance estimation model and a coordinates establishment scheme. A number of nodes serve as the landmarks to establish a coordinates system. Specifically, any pair of landmarks estimate their Euclidean distance according to the shortest path length between them and establish the coordinates system by minimizing an error objective function. Other nodes in the network can accordingly contact the landmarks and determine their own coordinates. The proposed technique is independent of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs), and the established coordinates can be easily tuned to GNSS if at least one node in the network is equipped with GNSS receiver. Our simulation results show that the proposed self-configurable positioning technique is highly fault-tolerable to measurement inaccuracy and can effectively establish the coordinates for multihop wireless networks. More landmarks yield more accurate results. With the rectification of our Euclidean distance estimation model, four to seven landmarks are usually sufficient to meet the accuracy requirement in a network with hundreds of nodes. The computing time for coordinates establishment is in the order of milliseconds for a GHz CPU, acceptable for most applications in the mobile ad hoc networks as well as the sensor networks.     

Mesh networks: commodity multihop ad hoc networks

In spite of the massive efforts in researching and developing mobile ad hoc networks in the last decade, this type of network has not yet witnessed mass market deployment. The low commercial penetration of products based on ad hoc networking technology could be explained by noting that the ongoing research is mainly focused on implementing military or specialized civilian applications. On the other hand, users are interested in general-purpose applications where high bandwidth and open access to the Internet are consolidated and cheap commodities. To turn mobile ad hoc networks into a commodity, we should move to more pragmatic "opportunistic ad hoc networking" in which multihop ad hoc networks are not isolated self-configured networks, but rather emerge as a flexible and low-cost extension of wired infrastructure networks coexisting with them. Indeed, a new class of networks is emerging from this view: mesh networks. This article provides an overview of mesh networking technology. In particular, starting from commercial case studies we describe the core building blocks and distinct features on which wireless mesh networks should be based. We provide a survey of the current state of the art in off-the-shelf and proprietary solutions to build wireless mesh networks. Finally, we address the challenges of designing a high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective wireless mesh network.