Random Backoff Scheme Research Articles

Reinforcement Learning Based MAC Protocol (UW-ALOHA-Q) for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The demand for regular monitoring of the marine environment and ocean exploration is rapidly increasing, yet the limited bandwidth and slow propagation speed of acoustic signals leads to low data throughput for underwater networks used for such purposes. This study describes a novel approach to medium access control that engenders efficient use of an acoustic channel. ALOHA-Q is a medium access protocol designed for terrestrial radio sensor networks and reinforcement learning is incorporated into the protocol to provide efficient channel access. In principle, it potentially offers opportunities for underwater network design, due to its adaptive capability and its responsiveness to environmental changes. However, preliminary work has shown that the achievable channel utilisation is much lower in underwater environments compared with the terrestrial environment. Three improvements are proposed in this paper to address key limitations and establish a new protocol (UW-ALOHA-Q). The new protocol includes asynchronous operation to eliminate the challenges associated with time synchronisation under water, offer an increase in channel utilisation through a reduction in the number of slots per frame, and achieve collision free scheduling by incorporating a new random back-off scheme. Simulations demonstrate that UW-ALOHA-Q provides considerable benefits in terms of achievable channel utilisation, particularly when used in large scale distributed networks.

Performance analysis and enhancement for a cooperative wireless diversity network with spatially random mobile helpers

In many studies on wireless cooperative diversity, it is often assumed that the number of helpers and their locations are deterministic or known a priori. In this paper, we relax such assumptions and investigate a wireless diversity system with distributed cooperation and spatially random helpers subject to random direction (RD) mobility. To enable opportunistic relaying with multiple helpers, we consider an ALOHA-like medium access control (MAC) scheme and a timer-based random backoff scheme for multi-helper coordination. Particularly, we analyze the upper bound of combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and unconditional success probability with multi-helper cooperation. We also provide numerical approximations for the delay of the two MAC schemes. To characterize the tradeoff between the success probability and delay, we further define a success/delay ratio, which can be maximized by adapting the intensity of selected helpers. The numerical and simulation results validated the analysis accuracy and demonstrated insightful observations.

차량 간 통신에서 충돌을 완화하기 위한 랜덤 백오프 방안

본 연구에서는 IEEE 802.11을 기반으로 하는 무선 차량 네트워크에서 위험 경고메시지를 효과적으로 전송하기 위한 Backoff 방안을 제안한다. 차량 간 통신인 IEEE 802.11은 위험 경고메시지를 보낼 때 다중 홉 방식을 사용하고, 다중접속방안으로 CSMA/CA를 적용하므로 차량이 밀집될수록 메시지 전송 충돌 확률이 증가한다. 따라서 위험 경고메시지 전송이 시간 지연될 가능성이 높다. 또한, 배경 트래픽이 있을 경우, 위험 경고메시지가 우선 전송이 되어야 한다. 이 같은 문제를 해결하기 위해 위험 경고메시지 전송차량과 수신차량의 위치에 따라 다른 난수발생범위를 갖는 거리 기반 백오프 방안 (DDAB: Distance-Dependent Adaptive Backoff)을 제안한다. DDAB는 배경 트래픽과 경쟁하는 영역의 차량들은 작은 난수발생범위로 설정하여 배경 트래픽보다 전송 우선순위를 높이고, 같은 위험 경고메시지 간 경쟁이 빈번한 영역의 차량들은 큰 난수발생범위를 갖도록 하여 위험 경고메시지간의 충돌을 줄인다. 실험을 통해 기존의 Backoff 방안과 비교하였으며, DDAB 방안을 적용한 경우 기존의 방안을 적용했을 때보다 성능 향상됨을 보였다. In this paper, we propose a random backoff scheme for Emergency Warning Messages (EWMs) in the vehicle-to-vehicle environment. The EWMs are disseminated from a vehicle that detects an emergency situation to other vehicles in a multi-hop fashion. Since the vehicle-to-vehicle communication based on IEEE 802.11 adapts CSMA/CA, the density of vehicles increase the probability of collisions between transmissions. Moreover, in the presence of background traffic, the EWM should have a higher priority than that of other messages in neighboring vehicles. To that end, we propose the Distant-Dependent Adaptive Backoff (DDAB) scheme, which set a different contention window for random backoff depending on the distance from the sender to the receiver. In the case when a vehicle is expected to located in the outskirts of the communication boundary, the proposed scheme makes the contention window size small in order to compete the background traffic transmission. Otherwise the contention window is set to a large number to reduce the collision possibility among the EWM transmissions. Via simulations, we show that the proposed scheme performs better than the previous schemes for EWM.

Transient Coordinator: a Collision Resolution Algorithm for Asynchronous MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) often employ asynchronous MAC scheduling, which allows each sensor node to wake up independently without synchronizing with its neighbor nodes. However, this asynchronous scheduling may not deal with collisions due to hidden terminals effectively. Although most of the existing asynchronous protocols exploit a random back-off technique to resolve collisions, the random back-off cannot secure a receiver from potentially repetitive collisions and may lead to a substantial increase in the packet latency. In this paper, we propose a new collision resolution algorithm called Transient Coordinator (TC) for asynchronous WSN MAC protocols. TC resolves a collision on demand by ordering senders` transmissions when a receiver detects a collision. To coordinate the transmission sequence both the receiver and the collided senders perform handshaking to collect the information and to derive a collision-free transmission sequence, which enables each sender to exclusively access the channel. According to the simulation results, our scheme can improve the average per-node throughput by up to 19.4% while it also reduces unnecessary energy consumption due to repetitive collisions by as much as 91.1% compared to the conventional asynchronous MAC protocols. This demonstrates that TC is more efficient in terms of performance, resource utilization, and energy compared to the random back-off scheme in dealing with collisions for asynchronous WSN MAC scheduling.