Distributed Coordination Function Research Articles

Improved VoWiFi cell capacity using A‐MPDU for frame aggregation in sixth‐generation WLAN standard

AbstractThe rapid progress in wireless communication technology and proliferation of multimedia applications, including voice over WiFi (VoWiFi), demand exploration of innovative approaches to enhance the network performance and quality of service. We propose a technique for enhancing the cell capacity of wireless local area network (WLAN) access point that provides VoWiFi service in the sixth‐generation WLAN standard. The proposed technique uses the aggregate media access control protocol data unit (A‐MPDU) for frame aggregation with constant bit rate (CBR) traffic in the WiFi 6 standard (i.e., IEEE 802.11ax). On the other hand, the retransmission of voice packets substantially deteriorates the VoWiFi cell capacity. We compare the results obtained from the use of WiFi 6 with currently existing WLAN standards, such as IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac. This comparison focuses on distributed coordination function interframe spacing (DIFS) and arbitration interframe spacing (AIFS) using CBR traffic. Using our technique, we can increase the VoWiFi cell capacity for CBR traffic by 24.25% and 25.20% when using DIFS and AIFS, respectively, while considering the A‐MPDU frame aggregation technique.

Analysis of the efficiency of block frame transmission in IEEE 802.11 computer networks

In infrastructure schemes of WLANs wireless computer networks, which are based on the use of the DSF (distributed coordination function) function and the CSMA/CA mechanism, the station STA (STAtion) sends a frame if the transmission channel is released after waiting for the end of the DIFS (distributed interframe space) interval and operation of the slot selec-tion mechanism for transmission (backoff mechanism). In case of collisions or damage to the frame by interference, the AP cannot decode the frame and does not send it back to the ACS station. The sending station STA waits for the re-ceipt of a potential ASK before the expiration of the corresponding timeout, and in case of receipt, starts the backoff procedure before transmission. The duration of the slot used in the backoff process depends on the speed of the physical layer technology. To reduce overhead, a transmission mechanism using frame blocks was proposed. This mechanism assumes that a block of frames intended for one recipient can be sent without con-firming the fact of correct reception by the AP access point of each frame separately. In this case, the sender (STA) competes for access to the channel for the first frame of the block. If it wins the access competition, the transmission of the first frame begins, and after receiving the ACK acknowledgment for it and a short SIFS separation interval, the STA transmits a whole block of frames, which is accompanied by a BAR service frame. The mechanism of frames block transmission in wireless computer networks IEEE 802.11 DCF with infrastructure topology has been analyzed. In protected mode, the depend-encies of network throughput on data transmission rate and the number of frames in a block are determined. It is shown that the mechanism of block transmission significantly increases the network throughput, especially in the range of higher transmission rates. With a marked increase in the intensity of interference the transmission of blocks becomes more complicated. Already with BER=10^-6 and the frames number of the order of 10 and more, in some cases there is a need to retransmit distorted in a block frames, and at BER=10^-5 there are many re-transmissions, so the resulting network throughput becomes small.

Proportional Fairness for Long-Term Evolution-Licensed Assisted Access (LTE-LAA) with Wi-Fi Coexistence in Unlicensed Spectrum

Long-Term Evaluation-Licensed Assisted Access (LTE-LAA) has good potential for fair coexistence with Wi-Fi in an unlicensed spectrum. Though the LTE-LAA utilizes the same listen before-talk technique as the distributed coordination function in IEEE 802.11, it utilizes completely different parameters and transmission durations. For this reason, a fair coexistence between LTE-LAA and Wi-Fi leaves an open question on how the LTE-LAA network should choose its parameters. To tackle this issue, an analytical framework considering the effects of varying important parameters, which are the different initial back-off window sizes, the numbers of sensing durations, the maximum back-off stages, the number of retransmissions and the transmission opportunities for LTE-LAA and Wi-Fi nodes on their performances has been developed. The node and network airtime performances are evaluated by using the current standard parameters setting to see how this setting affects the node and network airtime performances. From there, optimal settings of the initial backoff window size and number of sensing durations are applied by using the obtained node airtime equation that is derived from the Markov renewal process and evaluated as functions of system parameters. The optimum initial backoff window size and number of sensing durations of LTE-LAA are evaluated and verified by the calculation and simulation using MATLAB software. The analysis shows that LTE-LAA maintained unfair coexistence with Wi-Fi by using the current standard parameter setting as its initial back off window size or sensing duration. But in contrast, using the optimum initial backoff window size and number of sensing durations of LTE-LAA shows that they can maintain proportional fairness. It is unconcealed that the initial backoff window size tuning of LTE-LAA carries a high possibility of achieving fairness because it needs less system data and achieves a higher exactness result.

VoWiFi Cell Capacity Evaluation using WiFi 7 considering VBR Traffic

Deployment for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology is experiencing substantial growth. The transmission of Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) is half-duplex due to its single-talk nature. In order to mitigate the inefficient utilization of available bandwidth, the technique of silent suppression is employed. This feature decreases the level of ambient noise and provides Variable Bit Rate (VBR) communication. To enhance the VoWiFi cell capacity, we utilized VBR traffic instead of Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic. In this study, we developed a mathematical model to find the number of VoWiFi users possible within a WLAN Access Point (AP) considering G.729 vocoder. Arbitration inter-frame space (AIFS) has been utilized in our study to evaluate the channel state prior to transmitting real-time data between user equipment (UE) devices. Additionally, short inter-frame spacing (SIFS) has been employed to transmit Request To Send (RTS)/Clear To Send (CTS) and Acknowledgement (ACK) frames, enabling an examination of the VoWiFi cell capacity. Again, to increase the VoWiFi cell capacity, we incorporated the compressed RTP (cRTP) protocol. Further, we conducted an analysis on the impact of retransmission on VoWiFi cell capacity. This analysis involved a comparison of the results using VBR traffic with the previous WLAN standards, namely IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax. We observed that the improvement in VoWiFi cell capacity in VBR traffic is approximately 2.6 times more than the CBR traffic. Further, our research revealed that the enhancement in VoWiFi cell capacity is approximately 1.5% higher when utilizing AIFS compared to Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) inter-frame spacing (DIFS).

Towards V2I Age-Aware Fairness Access: A DQN Based Intelligent Vehicular Node Training and Test Method

Vehicles on the road exchange data with base station (BS) frequently through vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications to ensure the normal use of vehicular applications, where the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) is employed to allocate a minimum contention window (MCW) for channel access. Each vehicle may change its MCW to achieve more access opportunities at the expense of others, which results in unfair communication performance. Moreover, the key access parameters MCW is the privacy information and each vehicle are not willing to share it with other vehicles. In this uncertain setting, age of information (AoI) is an important communication metric to measure the freshness of data, we design an intelligent vehicular node to learn the dynamic environment and predict the optimal MCW which can make it achieve age fairness. In order to allocate the optimal MCW for the vehicular node, we employ a learning algorithm to make a desirable decision by learning from replay history data. In particular, the algorithm is proposed by extending the traditional DQN training and testing method. Finally, by comparing with other methods, it is proved that the proposed DQN method can significantly improve the age fairness of the intelligent node.

Performance analysis of distributed coordination function with early collision detection in In-band Full-duplex wireless networks

In-band Full-duplex (IB-FD) wireless has the potential to double the spectral efficiency offering its innate capability to resolve conventional problems emerge owing to the imperfect medium access control (MAC) in In-band half-duplex (IB-HD) wireless networks. IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF), a binary slotted exponential back-off with carrier sense multiple access scheme, has been used extensively in literature as the fundamental contention resolution technique to devise MAC protocols for IB-FD wireless networks. Unlike IB-HD, an IB-FD network can contain two simultaneously active transmission links within a single collision domain. This phenomenon invalidates the applicability of existing IB-HD models of the DCF to compute its performance (i.e., saturation throughput) accurately in IB-FD wireless networks. We have proposed two MAC protocols for two types of network scenarios taking early collision detection capability of an IB-FD wireless transceiver into consideration. This paper also presents a distinct analytical model to quantify the performance of the DCF in the context of IB-FD wireless assuming finite number of stations and idle channel conditions. We have applied the concept of primary–secondary transmission links and, thoroughly derived the probability that a station transmits either as primary or secondary in a randomly chosen time-slot taking secondary transmitter’s back-off counter into account. We have also investigated the effect of inter-station interference free IB-FD link on the performance of the DCF. Our protocol, when applied to network without hidden stations, has obtained the highest throughput gain of 1.59, 1.61, 1.68 while the DCF is configured with CWmin of 16, 32, 64, respectively than IEEE 802.11 basic access scheme. We have observed increased throughput gain with hidden stations, thanks to inter-station interference free transmission region, and achieved 2.12, 2.14, 2.16 times higher throughput, respectively than that of IEEE rts-cts access scheme.

A Rapidly Adaptive Collision Backoff Algorithm for Improving the Throughput in WLANs

In the 802.11 protocol, the fundamental medium access mechanism is called Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). In DCF, before making any transmission attempt, the nodes count down a timer with a value randomly selected from the Contention Window (CW) size. If the transmitted packet is involved in a collision, the node increases the CW size in an attempt to reduce the collision rate. Conversely, if the packet is transmitted successfully, the node reduces the CW size in order to increase the frequency of the transmission attempts. The growth or reduction in the CW size has a critical effect on the network performance. Several backoff algorithms have been proposed to improve the system throughput. However, none of these methods enable the system to approach the theoretical maximum throughput possible under DCF. Accordingly, this study proposes the Rapidly Adaptive Collision Backoff (RACB) algorithm, in which the CW size is adjusted dynamically based on the collision rate, as analyzed by a mathematical model. Notably, RACB requires no knowledge of the number of nodes in the wireless network and is applicable to both lightly loaded and heavily loaded networks. The numerical results show that, by adjusting the CW size such that the collision rate is maintained at a value close to 0.1, RACB enables the system throughput to approach the maximum DCF throughput in wireless environments containing any number of nodes.

Multiaccess Point Coordination for Next-Gen Wi-Fi Networks Aided by Deep Reinforcement Learning

Wi-Fi in the enterprise - characterized by overlapping Wi-Fi cells - constitutes the design challenge for next-generation networks. Standardization for recently started IEEE 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) Working Groups has focused on significant medium access control layer changes that emphasize the role of the access point (AP) in radio resource management (RRM) for coordinating channel access due to the high collision probability with the distributed coordination function (DCF), especially in dense overlapping Wi-Fi networks. This paper proposes a novel multi-AP coordination system architecture aided by a centralized AP controller (APC). Meanwhile, a deep reinforcement learning channel access (DLCA) protocol is developed to replace the binary exponential backoff mechanism in DCF to enhance the network throughput by enabling the coordination of APs. First-Order Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning further enhances the network throughput. Subsequently, we also put forward a new greedy algorithm to maintain proportional fairness (PF) among multiple APs. Via the simulation, the performance of DLCA protocol in dense overlapping Wi-Fi networks is verified to have strong stability and outperform baselines such as Shared Transmission Opportunity (SH-TXOP) and Request-to-Send/Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) in terms of the network throughput by 10% and 3% as well as the network utility considering proportional fairness by 28.3% and 13.8%, respectively.

Design and Performance Analysis of an In-Band Full-Duplex MAC Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a MAC protocol for ad hoc networks using In-band Full-duplex (IBFD) wireless communications, which are named as AdHoc-FDMAC. To utilize IBFD communications in ad hoc networks, this protocol modifies a number of control frames in the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) MAC standard. Here, the detailed time sequences for all types of IBFD communications are shown for the data transmission and routing. In this paper, the probability and throughput equations for IBFD communications in different situations have been derived. The performance of the proposed AdHoc-FDMAC has been analysed in terms of probability, throughput, and routing time. The Maximum throughput of AdHoc-FDMAC has been found to be 48.34 Mbps, and it is compared with a recently published ad hoc MAC as well as with the conventional HD MAC. The AdHoc-FDMAC outperforms the recently published ad hoc MAC and conventional HD MAC by 16.80% and 66.50% throughput gain, respectively. AdHoc-FDMAC incorporates the existing Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, but this AODV routing is utilized here using IBFD communications. This paper also compares the routing time of the IBFD-based AODV with the conventional AODV. The result shows that the IBFD-based AODV requires 33.33% less routing time than that of the conventional AODV for 3-hop distance between the transmitter and receiver. This paper suggests that the AdHoc-FDMAC protocol provides much more throughput in ad hoc networks by utilizing IBFD communications.

Theoretical and experimental study of performance anomaly in multi-rate IEEE802.11ac wireless networks

IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) are shared networks, which use contention-based distributed coordination function (DCF) to share access to wireless medium among numerous wireless stations. The performance of the distributed coordination function mechanism mostly depends on the network load, number of wireless nodes and their data rates. The throughput unfairness, also known as performance anomaly is inherent in the very nature of mixed data rate Wi-Fi networks using the distributed coordination function. This unfairness exhibits itself through the fact that slow clients consume more airtime to transfer a given amount of data, leaving less airtime for fast clients. In this paper, we comprehensively examine the performance anomaly in multi-rate wireless networks using three approaches: experimental measurement, analytical modelling and simulation in Network Simulator v.3 (NS3). The results of our practical experiments benchmarking the throughput of a multi-rate 802.11ac wireless network clearly shows that even the recent wireless standards still suffer from airtime consumption unfairness. It was shown that even a single low-data rate station can decrease the throughput of high-data rate stations by 3–6 times. The simulation and analytical modelling confirm this finding with considerably high accuracy. Most of the theoretical models evaluating performance anomaly in Wi-Fi networks suggest that all stations get the same throughput independently of the used data rate. However, experimental and simulation results have demonstrated that despite a significant performance degradation high-speed stations still outperform stations with lower data rates once the difference between data rates becomes more significant. This is due to the better efficiency of the TCP protocol working over a fast wireless connection. It is also noteworthy that the throughput achieved by a station when it monopolistically uses the wireless media is considerably less than 50 % of its data rate due to significant overheads even in most recent Wi-Fi technologies. Mitigating performance anomaly in mixed-data rate WLANs requires a holistic approach that combines frame aggregation/fragmentation and adaption of data rates, contention window and other link-layer parameters.

Study and Evaluation of Quality of Services in Mobile Internet Protocol v6 Using IEEE802.11e

Mobile Internet Protocol v6 (MIPv6) is a protocol that allows a mobile node (MN) to transparently maintain connections while moving from one subnet to another. Using the route optimization (RO) method in MIPv6 gives optimized routing and helps avoid triangular routing. In real-time applications such as video conference applications, quality of service (QoS) issues will increase especially in the handover process between subnets. This study investigates the performance of MIPv6 handover in IEEE802.11e standard in wireless environments. The investigation considers that handover for the MN moves between 2 home agents (HA). The system model’s fundamental performance limits are measured by packet delay variation, HA binding delay, and wireless local area network (WLAN) media access delay analysis metrics in video conference applications. According to the results of real-time simulations, network performance during the handover process can be effectively improved as the packet lost during handover decreased significantly from 43% in IEEE802.11b distributed coordination function (DCF) to 36% in IEEE802.11e hybrid coordination function (HCF). Furthermore, experimental results prove that IEEE802.11e connects to new HA roughly 20% quicker than IEEE802.11b, and IEEE802.11b has 100 times more time delay than IEEE802.11e. In addition to this, the WLAN media access delay of IEEE802.11b often reaches 0.00011 s as compared to 0.000005 s of IEEE802.11e. Thus, it is evident that the performance of IEEE802.11e in terms of packet delay variation, HA binding delay, and WLAN media access delay is better than IEEE802.11b. Likewise, it is noted that network speed during the handover process in IEEE802.11e can be considerably improved in a MIPv6 scenario.

Starvation mitigation and priority aware of CSMA/CA in WSN with implementing Markov chain model

In the domain of wireless networking, the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) has a wide range of applications. Based on CSMA/CA, the IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol is used for the body network area. For reduction of the collision’s probability, the accessing the medium, the CSMA/CA uses a distributed coordination function. For a node to transmit the data in CSMA/CA, the channel is sensed and then the transmission is initiated if it happens to be idle. For a contention period, the node is deferred for transmission, if the channel happens to be busy. When the multiple nodes attempt to access a channel, their issue of contention will be solved by this mechanism. As a side effect, there is starvation of the decaying nodes, and the data latency is noticeably increased. For a delay-sensitive application, CSMA/CA protocol becomes inapplicable as the higher risk of fatality is associated with the delay critical applications, such as vehicle cohesion avoidance system and the health-care system.In the modeling process, the channel load is not taken into account at first. For high-priority services, channel detection is performed once. For low priority services, channel detection is performed twice. Markov chain model is used to analyze the influence of algorithm parameter setting on network performance, and it shows great efficiency. Accidents may become inevitable with the exponential latency in the receiving of an emergency notification. Hence, for backing up the loopholes of IEEE 802.15.6 MAC protocol and uprising the response rate of the emergency and warning cases, the author substitutes back off the procedure by proposing a solution that considers the level of emergency or the priority of the message with the help of associated contention window and level of emergency. This reduces the chances of starvation as well. The techniques for CSMA/CA that are priority aware, surely outperform the state of the art back off and this is proved by simulation that the model has enhanced the efficiency of the channel in regards to throughput, delays in transmission, utilization of the bandwidth.

Collision-Based Window-Scaled Back-Off Mechanism for Dense Channel Resource Allocation in Future Wi-Fi

Wireless local area networks (WLANs), known as Wi-Fi, are widely deployed to meet the enhanced needs of data-centric internet applications, such as wireless docking, unified communications, cloud computing, interactive multimedia gaming, progressive streaming, support of wearable devices, up-link broadcasts and cellular offloading. Wi-Fi networks typically adopt the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF)-based Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), which uses the Binary Exponential Back-off (BEB) algorithm at the MAC layer mechanism to access channel resources. Currently deployed Wi-Fi networks face huge challenges towards efficient channel access for denser environments due to the blind exponential increase/decrease of a contention window (CW) procedure that is inefficient for a higher number of contending stations. Several modifications and amendments have been proposed to improve the performance of the MAC layer channel access based on a fixed or variable CW size. However, a more realistic network density-based channel resource allocation solution is still missing. An efficient channel resource allocation is one of the most critical challenges for future highly dense WLANs, such as High-Efficiency WLAN (HEW). In this paper, we propose a Channel Collision-based Window Scaled Back-off (CWSB) mechanism for channel resource allocation in HEW. In our proposed CWSB, all contending stations select an optimized CW size for each back-off stage for collided or successfully transmitted data frames. We affirm the performance of the proposed CWSB mechanism with the help of an Iterative Discrete Time Markov Chain (I-DTMC) model. This paper evaluates the performance of our proposed CWSB mechanism in HEW Wi-Fi networks using an NS3 simulator in terms of the normalized throughput and channel access delay compared to the state-of-the-art BEB and a recently proposed mechanism.

Velocity-Adaptive Access Scheme for MEC-Assisted Platooning Networks: Access Fairness Via Data Freshness

Platooning strategy is an important part of autonomous driving technology. Due to the limited resource of autonomous vehicles in platoons, mobile edge computing (MEC) is usually used to assist vehicles in platoons to obtain useful information, increasing its safety. Specifically, vehicles usually adopt the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism to transmit large amount of data to the base station (BS) through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, where the useful information can be extracted by the edge server connected to the BS and then sent back to the vehicles to make correct decisions in time. However, vehicles may be moving on different lanes with different velocities, which incurs the unfair access due to the characteristics of platoons, i.e., vehicles on different lanes transmit different amount of data to the BS when they pass through the coverage of the BS, which also results in the different amount of useful information received by various vehicles. Moreover, age of information (AoI) is an important performance metric to measure the freshness of the data. Large average age of data implies not receiving the useful information in time. It is necessary to design an access scheme to jointly optimize the fairness and data freshness. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem in the MEC-assisted V2I networks and present a multi-objective optimization scheme to solve the problem through adjusting the minimum contention window under the IEEE 802.11 DCF mode according to the velocities of vehicles. The effectiveness of the scheme has been demonstrated by simulation.

Fuzzy logic based cross-layer design to improve Quality of Service in Mobile ad-hoc networks for Next-gen Cyber Physical System

5G standard by 3GGP has provision for Device-to-Device (D2D) communication over a Wireless Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) framework. Recent research and development in 6G Networks and beyond has support for integration of MANET to the Mobile communication infrastructure to cater services to many potential future-proof applications like Smart Vehicular Networks using Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANET) for drone networks and military Ad-hoc networks. MANET being an Ad-hoc and infrastructure-less network poses major deployment challenge in resource allocation and management to facilitate strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for future Internet of Things (IoT) based Next-generation Cyber Physical System (NG-CPS). Most of MANETs use Contention-based Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) random Access Media Access Control (MAC) and a generic TCP/IP stack implementation. It is a daunting task to have deterministic model of network parameters for specific QoS requirements of IoT applications hence a soft-computing approach would be most viable solution considering network parameters across all five layers of TCP/IP stack that is a Cross-Layer design approach to improve QoS. In this paper, we have proposed a Fuzzy Logic system based Cross-Layer (FLS-CL) design for MANET to improve Network QoS parameters like Throughput, Packet Delivery ration (PDR) and End-to-End (E2E) delay. The proposed system has been implemented using Fuzzy Logic based parameters modeling using MATLAB and the Network simulation study using QualNet® simulator. The results are promising with average 27.64 % improvement in PDR and 76.04 % less E2E delay for connection-less UDP-based CBR applications and 3.28 % improvement in PDR and 58.81 % less E2E delay for connection-oriented TCP-based FTP applications. The QoS improvements are achieved with proposed FLS-CL as compared to state-of-the-art IEEE 802.11 based MANET without any FLS cross-layer optimization.

Backoff Entropy: Predicting Presaturation Peak for IEEE 802.11 DCF Networks

In nonsaturated 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) networks, existing studies had observed a salient phenomenon: the maximum stable throughput may be far higher than the saturation throughput and last for a long duration (say, months). Such a maximum stable throughput is called the presaturation throughput peak. The long-duration peak suggests that 802.11 DCF networks may provide a far higher stable throughput than what we generally believe, without worrying about a sudden deterioration of quality of service (QoS). This paper is devoted to developing a general theoretical framework to predict the peak. In the framework, we define a backoff entropy to quantify the uncertainty of the inherent random backoff process of 802.11 DCF networks, and then innovatively introduce a BackoffEntropy-Peak linearity property (i.e., the peak is linearly proportional to the backoff entropy) for the peak prediction. This framework is applicable for a general configuration of contention windows (CWs). It enables us to reveal the most essential dependency of the peak on the initial CW size and the number of network nodes. Further, we design peak-based call admission control (CAC) schemes that can be performed quickly and easily, without requiring network performance measurements and complex calculations. We verify our framework and CAC schemes via widely adopted 802.11 DCF ns2 and ns3 simulators (mostly with typical 802.11 standard settings). Extensive simulations show that our framework and CAC schemes trade within 9% peak prediction errors for making 802.11 DCF networks provide high stable throughput with good QoS (such as short delay and low collision probability). This paper is the first to propose applying the information entropy to study the throughput-stability problem. We believe that this study makes a crucial breakthrough in thoroughly investigating nonsaturated performance and network stability of random access wireless networks.

Performance Analysis of Heterogeneous Systems Ieee 802.11 and Ieee 802.16 Using Spectrum Sharing Mechanism

After the advent of cellular standards for mobile wireless voice telephony and data transfer, IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 standards evolved for wireless broadband data transfer. The IEEE 802.11 replaced the wired LAN and IEEE 802.16 was to wireless point-to-point provide broadband data transfer. IEEE 802.11 operates in 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands whereas IEEE 802.11, which was initially designed to operate on a licensed band, later switched to a 2-11 GHz band. However, both these standards used a 5 GHz unlicensed band for transmission causing the possible overlap of channels. The designed protocols fairly allow the sharing on an ad-hoc basis. IEEE 802.11 operated in distributed coordination mode using Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and point coordinated mode using a dedicated coordinator node called Point Coordination Function (PCF). However, DCF mode allows spectrum sharing for multiple users. Both standards were not designed for coexistence and thereby they may cause interference to each other, degrading their performance. Mechanisms can be designed at various layers such as MAC or PHY to enable the coexistence with desired QoS. In this paper, a performance analysis of the impact of possible interference between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 devices is presented. Therefore, this paper presents the approaches for allowing a reliable operation between IEEE 802.16 and IEEE 802.11 when both are sharing unlicensed spectrum 5GHz. In this paper, we propose advancements to the MAC of IEEE 802.16 Base Station (BS) where IEEE 802.11 frame transmissions are not required by an IEEE 802.16 system. Here, Co-existence between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 is permitted without any exchange of data between both standards, and also it provides quality of service for both systems operating at unlicensed spectrum 5GHz.

How IEEE 802.11ba Wake-Up Radio Coexists With Legacy WiFi?

The IEEE 802.11ba is a new Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard to incorporate the Wake-up Radio (WuR) technology into the existing IEEE 802.11 system, where Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) is employed. IEEE 802.11ba holds importance for the Internet of Things (IoT) network deployment due to its low power WuR characteristics and backward compatibility with legacy WLAN networks. In this letter we model the mechanism of wake-up radio devices and investigate the interaction between the wake-up radio devices and the legacy devices in the coexisting scenario. The model can be utilized to quantify the behavior of WuR devices under a legacy WLAN network.

StegoFrameOrder-MAC Layer Covert Network Channel for Wireless IEEE 802.11 Networks.

The proposed StegoFrameOrder (SFO) method enables the transmission of covert data in wireless computer networks exploiting non-deterministic algorithms of medium access (such as the distributed coordination function), especially in IEEE 802.11 networks. Such a covert channel enables the possibility of leaking crucial information outside secured network in a manner that is difficult to detect. The SFO method embeds hidden bits of information in the relative order of frames transmitted by wireless terminals operating on the same radio channel. The paper presents an idea of this covert channel, its implementation, and possible variants. The paper also discusses implementing the SFO method in a real environment and the experiments performed in the real-world scenario.

Enhanced collision resolution and throughput analysis for the 802.11 distributed coordination function

SummaryThe IEEE 802 standards rely on the distributed coordination function (DCF) as the fundamental medium access control method. DCF uses the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm to regulate channel access. The backoff time determined by BEB depends on a contention window (CW) whose size is doubled if a station suffers a collision and reset to its minimum value after a successful transmission. Doubling the size of CW reduces channel access time, which decreases the throughput. Resetting it to its minimum value harms fairness since the station will have a better chance of accessing the channel compared to stations that suffered a collision. We propose an algorithm that addresses collisions without instantly increasing the CW size. Our algorithm aims to reduce the collision probability without affecting the channel access time and delay. We present extensive simulations for fixed and mobile scenarios. The results show that, on average, our algorithm outperforms BEB in terms of throughput and fairness. Compared to exponential increase exponential decrease (EIED), our algorithm improves, on average, throughput and delay performance. We also propose analytical models for BEB, EIED and our algorithm. Our models extend Bianchi's popular Markov chain‐based model by using a collision probability that is dependent on the station transmission history. Our models provide a better estimation of the probability that a station transmits in a random slot time, which allows a more accurate throughput analysis. Using our models, we show that both the saturation throughput and maximum throughput of our algorithm are higher than those of BEB and EIED.