Cell Breathing Techniques for Load Balancing in Wireless LANs

Maximizing network throughput while providing fairness is one of the key challenges in wireless LANs (WLANs). This goal is typically achieved when the load of access points (APs) is balanced. Recent studies on operational WLANs, however, have shown that AP load is often substantially uneven. To alleviate such imbalance of load, several load balancing schemes have been proposed. These schemes commonly require proprietary software or hardware at the user side for controlling the user-AP association. In this paper we present a new load balancing technique by controlling the size of WLAN cells (i.e., AP's coverage range), which is conceptually similar to cell breathing in cellular networks. The proposed scheme does not require any modification to the users neither the IEEE 802.11 standard. It only requires the ability of dynamically changing the transmission power of the AP beacon messages. We develop a set of polynomial time algorithms that find the optimal beacon power settings which minimize the load of the most congested AP. We also consider the problem of network-wide min-max load balancing. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable with or superior to the best existing association-based methods.     

An Overlay Smart Spaces System for Load Balancing in Wireless LANs

An overlay smart spaces system, called MITOS, is proposed for managing the use of the resources in wireless local area networks (WLAN). MITOS monitors the traffic load distribution in the different WLAN segments, as well as the location of each user, and when necessary, suggests to specific users to change their location in order to improve their quality of service. Enhancements to the basic MITOS architecture are introduced to intelligently manage local congestion, and maintain an almost uniform load level across the network. The approach used for load balancing is based on game theoretic mechanisms, such as the solutions to the Santa Fe Bar Problem. Simulation results are provided showing the efficiency of the proposed system. The research of the author for his PhD studies is supported by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation Scholarship Programme. George Alyfantis received his B.Sc. degree in Informatics and Telecommunications from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, Athens Greece, in 2002. He received his M.Sc. degree in Communication and Network Systems from the same Department, in 2003. Since 2001, he is a member of the Communication Networks Laboratory (CNL) of the University of Athens. Currently, he is working towards his Ph.D. thesis. His research interests include pervasive/mobile computing, middleware for wireless sensor networks, web caching performance and game theory. He is the author of 5 papers in the aforementioned areas. In the course of his studies he received numerous distinctions like the Alexandros Onassis Foundation Scholarship for his Ph.D. studies, the best student award of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications for graduating first in his B.Sc./M.Sc. class and the best M.Sc. thesis Ericsson Award of Excellence in Telecommunications 2004. Stathes Hadjiefthymiades received his B.Sc. (honors) in Informatics from the Department of Informatics at the University of Athens, Greece, in 1993 and his M.Sc. (honors) in Informatics (Advanced information systems) from the same department in 1996. In 1999 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Athens (Department of Informatics and Telecommunications). In 2002 he received a joint engineering-economics M.Sc. degree from the National Technical University of Athens. In 1992 he joined the Greek consulting firm Advanced Services Group, Ltd., where he was involved in the analysis and specification of information systems and the design-implementation of telematic applications. In 1995 he became a member of the Communication Networks Laboratory (UoA-CNL) of the University of Athens. During the period September 2001–July 2002, he served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Aegean, Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering. On the summer of 2002 he joined the faculty of the Hellenic Open University (Department of Informatics), Patras, Greece, as an assistant professor. Since December 2003, he is in the faculty of the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, where he is presently an assistant professor. He is coordinating the Pervasive Computing Research Group of the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens. He has participated in numerous projects realized in the context of EU programs (ACTS, ORA, TAP, and IST), EURESCOM projects, as well as national initiatives. His research interests are in the areas of web engineering, wireless/mobile computing, and networked multimedia applications. He is the author of over 80 publications in the above areas. Lazaros Merakos received the Diploma in electrical and mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, in 1978, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1981 and 1984, respectively. From 1983 to 1986, he was in the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department University of Connecticut, Storrs. From 1986 to 1994 he was in the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. During the period 1993–1994, he served as director of the Communications and Digital Processing Research Center, Northeastern University. During the summers of 1990 and 1991, he was a visiting scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the University of Athens, Athens, Greece, where he is presently a professor in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, and director of the Communication Networks Laboratory (UoA-CNL) and the Networks Operations and Management Center. Since 1995, he is leading the research activities of UoA-CNL in the area of mobile communications, in the framework of the Advanced Communication Technologies and Services (ACTS) and Information Society Technologies (IST) programs funded by the European Union (projects RAINBOW, Magic WAND, WINE, MOBIVAS, POLOS, ANWIRE, E2R, LIAISON). His research interests are in the design and performance analysis of communication networks, and wireless/mobile communication systems and services. He has authored more than 190 papers in the above areas. Dr. Merakos is chairman of the board of the Greek Universities Network, the Greek Schools Network, and member of the board of the Greek Research Network. In 1994, he received the Guanella Award for the best paper presented at the International Zurich Seminar on Mobile Communications.     

Throughput Optimization via Association Control in Wireless LANs

With the rapid development of the mobile computing, accessing the Internet everywhere is important for mobile device users. Wireless LAN is a stable and reliable technique to provide network access for mobile devices. The Wireless LAN Access Points(APs) have been densely deployed so that a user can access the Internet almost everywhere. However, this fact brings some new challenges. Since the regular AP association strategy is signal-based when a user receive the signals of multiple APs. The APs with strong signal will be too overloaded while the bandwidth resource in other APs is wasted. The throughput of the whole WLAN is not optimized. Moreover, the diverse bandwidth demands among users further exacerbate the situation. In this paper, aiming at optimizing the throughput over the whole WLAN, a joint AP association and bandwidth allocation problem is formulated. The different users’ bandwidth demands are added as new constraints. We comprehensively analyze the solution space and prove the problem NP-hard. Our trace-driven evaluations show that the throughput is improved about 23.1 % compared to the conventional schemes.     

Sequential Coordination Function for Throughput and Fairness Enhancement of Wireless LANs

High throughput and fair resource sharing are two of the most important objectives in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol. Currently, most MAC protocols including IEEE 802.11 DCF adopt a random access based approach in a distributed manner in order to coordinate the wireless channel accesses among competing stations. In this paper, we first identify that a random access?Cbased MAC protocol may suffer from MAC protocol overhead such as a random backoff for data transmission and a collision among simultaneously transmitting stations. Then, we propose a new MAC protocol, called sequential coordination function (SCF), which coordinates every station to send a data frame sequentially one after another in a distributed manner. By defining a service period and a joining period, the SCF eliminates unnecessary contentions during the service period, and by explicitly determining the sequence of frame transmission for each stations, it reduces collision occurrences and ensures fairness among stations in the service period. The performance of SCF is investigated through intensive simulations, which show that the SCF achieves higher throughput and fairness performances than other existing MAC protocols in a wide range of the traffic load and the number of stations.     

3patial Load Balancing in Nide-Area Wireless Networks

Load balancing is typically used in the frequency domain of cellular wireless networks to balance paging, access, and traffic load across the available bandwidth. In this paper, we extend load balancing into the spatial domain, and we develop two approaches-network load balancing and single-carrier multilink-for spatial load balancing. Although these techniques are mostly applied to cellular wireless networks and Wi-Fi networks, we show how they can be applied to EV-DO, a 3G cellular data network. When a device has more than one candidate server, these techniques can be used to determine the quality of the channel between a server and the device and to determine the load on each server. The proposed techniques leverage the advantages of existing EV-DO network architecture and are fully backward compatible. Network operators can substantially increase network capacity and improve user experience by using these techniques. Combining load balancing in the frequency and spatial domains improves connectivity within a network and allows resources to be optimally allocated according to the p-fair criterion. Combined load balancing further improves performance.     

异构无线网络中基于业务转移和接入控制的混合负载均衡

 针对现有异构无线网络负载均衡方法未能综合考虑重载网络业务转移和新业务接入控制的问题,提出了一种混合负载均衡算法.该算法首先根据各小区负载水平和终端移动性,将重载小区的适量业务向重叠覆盖的轻载小区转移;其次通过资源预留和强占优先的接入控制策略,为不同优先级的新到业务提供有差别的服务.仿真结果表明,本文算法在保证系统资源利用率的同时,保障了实时与非实时业务的QoS,并相对于参考算法有效降低了系统阻塞率和业务切换概率.     

Distributed Topology Control Algorithm Based on Load Balancing Evaluation Model in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Personal Communications - In wireless sensor networks, the unbalanced load of nodes is easy to cause low energy nodes die prematurely. It may lead network collapse. According to the...     

Joint Transmit Power Control and Rate Adaptation for Wireless LANs

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are widely deployed recently. But many basic service sets (BSSs) nearby have to share a common channel due to the limitation in the spectrum resource. To get higher throughput with newly deployed access points (APs), it is necessary to improve spatial reuse of the channels by transmit power control (TPC). The achievable throughput, however, heavily depends on other factors such as rate adaptation (RA). Moreover, TPC without careful design may lead to asymmetric links and degrade fairness. In this paper, we jointly design TPC and RA to further improve total throughput of WLANs, and suggest (i) choosing power for each BSS by maximizing throughput which takes tradeoff between transmit rate and spatial reuse of channels, and, (ii) avoiding potential asymmetric links by explicit coordination among APs: each BSS uses almost the same power as its co-channel neighbors while BSSs far from each other may use different power levels as required. Extensive simulation evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme can greatly improve total throughput of dense WLANs, meanwhile fairness is retained.     

Contention-Based Airtime Usage Control in Multirate IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

In a multirate wireless LAN, wireless/mobile stations usually adapt their transmission rates to the channel condition. It is difficult to control each station's usage of network resources since the shared channel can be overused by low transmission-rate stations. To solve this problem, we propose a distributed control of stations' airtime usage which 1) always guarantees each station to receive a specified share of airtime, and 2) keeps service for individual stations unaffected by other stations' transmission rates. Such airtime control enables service differentiation or quality of service (QoS) support. Moreover, it can achieve a higher overall system throughput. The proposed airtime usage control exploits the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) of the IEEE 802.11e standard . Two control mechanisms are proposed: one based on controlling the station's arbitration inter-frame space (AIFS) and the other based on the contention window size. We show how the stations' airtime usage is related to the AIFS and contention window size parameters. Using this relation, two analytical models are developed to determine the optimal control parameters. Unlike the other heuristic controls or analytical models, our model provides handles or parameters for quantitative control of stations' airtime usage. Our evaluation results show that a precise airtime usage control can be achieved in a multirate wireless LAN     

Proportional Service Differentiation in Wireless LANs Using Spacing-based Channel Occupancy Regulation

In this paper, we propose Spacing-based Channel Occupancy Regulation (SCORE) MAC protocol for wireless LANs that provides proportional service differentiation in terms of normalized throughput. As shown by our system model and simulation study, SCORE provides consistent, scalable and adjustable proportional differentiation for any network size, any service class distribution, any node data rate and any packet size. Compared to state-of-the-art prioritized service differentiation schemes like Enhanced Distributed Coordination Function (EDCF), SCORE can quantitatively control the channel sharing between different service classes. Moreover, SCORE obtains significant performance improvements in terms of higher network throughput, higher transmission efficiency, lower medium access delay and lower delay jitter. Dr. Qi Xue is now a senior systems engineer with Qualcomm Inc. since Feb. 2005. Qi Xue is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his M.S. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2000. His research interests include protocol design and performance analysis in wireless networks. Weibo Gong received his Ph.D degree from Harvard University in 1987, and have been with the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst since then. He is also an adjunct professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at the same campus. His major research interests include control and systems methods in communication networks, network security, and network modeling and analysis. He is a receipient of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control’s George Axelby Outstanding paper award, an IEEE Fellow, and the Program Committee Chair for the 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Aura Ganz received her B.Sc, M.Sc and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the Technion in Israel. She is currently an associate professor and Director of the Multimedia Networks Laboratory at the ECE Department, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has experience in topics related to all strata of networking technology, from work related to topics in the network infrastructure development to advanced user-space application development for mobile clients. The research results are validated by a combination of analytical, simulation and prototyping tools. She has published a book “Multimedia Wireless Networks: Technologies, Standards and QoS” (Prentice Hall) and authored over one hundred and fifty peer reviewed publications. Dr. Ganz is a senior member of IEEE     

WMN中一种基于干扰感知的负载均衡路由协议

无线信道干扰和负载分布的不均衡严重影响无线Mesh网络吞吐量、端到端延时和资源利用率。在已有基于信噪比和邻居节点个数的干扰模型基础上,进一步研究了无线Mesh网络的链路干扰。在综合考虑了无线Mesh网络流间干扰和和流内干扰的基础上,提出路由判据PIL（Path Interfer-ence Level）。在此基础上,提出一种新的基于干扰感知的负载均衡路由协议IA-DSR（Interference-Aware DSR）。IA-DSR考虑无线网络拥塞并选择受到干扰最小的路径。仿真结果表明,在不显著增加开销的情况下,IA-DSR可以有效地提高网络的整体吞吐量,降低网络端到端时延和丢包率。     

Advocating a Remote Socket Architecture for Internet Access Using Wireless LANs

One challenge in the development of telecommunication networks is the seamless integration of wireless devices into the global Internet. Although it is well known that the Internet protocols were designed for heterogeneous networks an end-system with the usual Internet protocol stack will suffer an inefficient communication while connected via a wireless link. The protocol mechanisms of the transport layer can lead to poor performance in case of TCP and a high loss rate in case of UDP. In this paper we advocate a Remote Socket Architecture (ReSoA) which is a kind of proxy-oriented architecture for wireless Internet access in Wireless LAN environment. This approach allows the use of a thin protocol stack on the wireless end-system to save scarce resources and a tailored protocol for the wireless link without breaking the original TCP semantics. We show the suitability of ReSoA by comparing its performance with that of pure TCP and Berkeley Snoop through actual measurements in a test environment.     

Reliable Multicast in Multi-Access Wireless LANs

Multicast is an efficient paradigm for transmitting data from a sender to a group of receivers. In this paper, we focus on multicast in single channel multi-access wireless local area networks (LANs) comprising several small cells. In such a system, a receiver cannot correctly receive a packet if two or more packets are sent to it at the same time, because the packets collide. Therefore, one has to ensure that only one node sends at a time. We look at two important issues. First, we consider the problem of the sender acquiring the multi-access channel for multicast transmission. Second, for reliable multicast in each cell of the wireless LAN, we examine ARQ-based approaches. The second issue is important because the wireless link error rates can be very high.We present a new approach to overcome the problem of feedback collision in single channel multi-access wireless LANs, both for the purpose of acquiring the channel and for reliability. Our approach involves the election of one of the multicast group members (receivers) as a leader or representative for the purpose of sending feedback to the sender. For reliable multicast, on erroneous reception of a packet, the leader does not send an acknowledgment, prompting a retransmission. On erroneous reception of the packet at receivers other than the leader, our protocol allows negative acknowledgments from these receivers to collide with the acknowledgment from the leader, thus destroying the acknowledgment and prompting the sender to retransmit the packet.Using analytical models, we demonstrate that the leader-based protocol exhibits higher throughput in comparison to two other protocols which use traditional delayed feedback-based probabilistic methods. Last, we present a simple scheme for leader election.     

Advances on Wireless LANs and PANs

Call for Papers

Advances on Wireless LANs and PANs     

Distributed Optimal Contention Window Control for Elastic Traffic in Single-Cell Wireless LANs

This paper presents a theoretical study on distributed contention window control algorithms for achieving arbitrary bandwidth allocation policies and efficient channel utilization. By modeling different bandwidth allocation policies as an optimal contention window assignment problem, the authors design a general and fully distributed contention window control algorithm, called general contention window adaptation (GCA), and prove that it converges to the solution of the contention window assignment problem. By examining the stability of GCA, we identify the optimal stable point that maximizes channel utilization and provide solutions to control the stable point near the optimal point. Due to the generality of GCA, this work provides a theoretical foundation to analyze existing and design new contention window control algorithms.     

Performance Analysis for a New Medium Access Control Protocol in Wireless LANs

One fundamental issue in high-speed wireless local area networks (LANs) is to develop efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, we focus on the performance improvement in both MAC layer and transport layer by using a novel medium access control protocol for high-speed wireless LANs deploying carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). We first present a recently proposed distributed contention-based MAC protocol utilizing a Fast Collision Resolution (FCR) algorithm and show that the proposed FCR algorithm provides high throughput and low latency while improving the fairness performance. The performance of the FCR algorithm is compared with that of the IEEE 802.11 MAC algorithm via extensive simulation studies on both MAC layer and transport layer. The results show that the FCR algorithm achieves a significantly higher efficiency than the IEEE 802.11 MAC and can significantly improve transport layer performance.     

网络负载均衡的控制理论及实践战略

网络负载均衡技术NLB（Network Load Balancing）采用完全分配算法来为集群中的服务器分配进入的访问流量,当集群中的某台服务器失效时,NLB会自动转发数据到其他可用的服务器上。负载均衡由多台服务器以对称的方式组成一个服务器集合,每台服务器都具有等价的地位,都可以单独对外提供服务而无须其他服务器的辅助。通过某种负载分担技术,将外部发送来的请求均匀分配到对称结构中的某一台服务器上,而接收到请求的服务器独立地回应客户的请求。均衡负载能够平均分配客户请求到服务器列阵,籍此提供快速获取重要数据,解决大量并发访问服务问题。     

Distributed Contention Window Control for Selfish Users in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

In this paper, we study non-cooperative user behavior in random-access wireless networks in which users have freedom to choose their back-off contention window size according to network's congestion status. We formulate a non- cooperative game and show the existence and uniqueness of its equilibrium point. We also propose an iterative method leading to the equilibrium point of the game. A discussion of alternative game formulations in the same problem context is also given.     

Interference Analysis and Transmit Power Control in IEEE 802.11a/h Wireless LANs

Reducing the energy consumption by wireless communication devices is perhaps the most important issue in the widely deployed and dramatically growing IEEE 802.11 WLANs (wireless local area networks). TPC (transmit power control) has been recognized as one of the effective ways to achieve this goal. In this paper, we study the emerging 802.11a/h systems that provide a structured means to support intelligent TPC. Based on a rigorous analysis of the relationship among different radio ranges and TPC's effects on the interference, we present an optimal low-energy transmission strategy, called MiSer, which is deployed in the format of RTS-CTS(strong)-Data(MiSer)-Ack. The key idea of MiSer is to combine TPC with PHY (physical layer) rate adaptation and compute offline an optimal rate-power combination table, then at runtime, a wireless station determines the most energy-efficient transmission strategy for each data frame transmission by a simple table lookup. Simulation results show MiSer's clear superiority to other two-way or four-way frame exchange mechanisms in terms of energy conservation.