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This paper addresses a movement-aware vertical (MA V) handover algorithm between WLAN and Mobile WiMAX for seamless ubiquitous access. An MA V handover algorithm is proposed in this paper to exploit movement pattern for avoiding unnecessary handovers in the integrated WLAN and Mobile WiMAX networks. If a mobile station (MS) `s velocity is high and its movement pattern is irregular, unnecessary handovers likely occur more frequently. Therefore, the MS velocity and moving pattern are important factors for the handover decision procedure. To avoid unnecessary handovers, the MA V handover algorithm adjusts the dwell time adaptively and predicts the residual time in the cell of target base station (BS). Consequently, the adaptive dwell timer of MA V handover algorithm allows an MS a better connection as long as possible. Our simulation results show that the reduction of unnecessary handovers by leads to sign significant throughput improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a wireless ad hoc network where each node employs a single-beam directional antenna and is provisioned with limited energy. We are interested in an online routing algorithm for successive multicast communication requests with the aim of maximizing the network lifetime. The beam-forming property, which is associated with single-beam directional antennas, introduces some unique problems that do not exist for omnidirectional antennas and, therefore, significantly increases the design space for routing algorithms. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we provide some important theoretical understanding on various multicast problems and deduce that even an offline version of this problem is NP-hard. Second, we develop a highly competitive online routing algorithm that takes the network lifetime consideration directly into iterative calculations and show that an algorithm that is designed under this methodology provides consistently better performance than the current state-of-the-art algorithm that only considers remaining energy. The theoretical results and routing algorithm in this paper offer some important insights on algorithm design for energy-constrained wireless ad hoc networks with directional antennas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are gaining popularity in recent years due to their flexibility, the proliferation of smart computing devices, and developments in wireless communications. Due to the mobile nature of the network, creating reliable clusters that can sustain for long period of time is a challenging problem. In this paper, we use probabilistic analysis to guide our clustering algorithm towards more reliable clusters. We also use scatter search to perform clustering while considering various performancemetrics. Experiment results show that our clustering approach produces more reliable clusters than prior approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current wireless access networks are able to provide relatively low data rates when compared with wired access. To extend the access to high-data-rate services to wireless users, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) established new requirements for future wireless communication technologies of up to 100 Mb/s under high-mobility conditions and 1 Gb/s in low mobility. The low mobility goal can only be achieved through the use of highly optimized local area access networks operating at low range and low transmission power. The efficient sharing of radio resources among local area cells will be very difficult to achieve with a traditional network planning/dimensioning approach due to their intrinsic uncoordinated deployment characteristic. Cognitive radio (CR)-based networking methodologies are considered as the most promising solutions for such radio-resource-sharing problems, also enabling unlicensed/open spectrum operations. In this paper, a game-theory-inspired scalable algorithm for intercell dynamic spectrum access (IC-DSA) is introduced to enable distributed resource allocation in CR environments. Here, the new CR-based cell is called "cognitive cell (C-cell)," and it is the minimal entity that allocates a resource set. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed spectrum-sharing approach. This solution achieves a better overall performance in several load and interference scenarios in terms of both outage and average capacity when compared with fixed-frequency-reuse cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, adaptive sectoring of a CDMA cellular network is investigated, and the aim is to maximize the uplink capacity by utilizing mobiles' spatial information. One important feature of the algorithm developed is that it does not depend on tracking individual mobile, but rather on the statistics of mobiles. The distribution of mobiles is modeled as a spatial Poisson process, whose rate function quantizes mobile concentration and is inferred with a Bayesian estimator based on the statistics of network traffic. In addition, the time dynamics of the rate function is assumed to evolve according to mobiles' mobility pattern and it is formulated using the Influence model. With the knowledge of mobiles' spatial distribution, the interference and thus the outage probability of different sector partitions of a cell can be computed. The adaptive sectoring problem is formulated as a shortest path problem, where each path corresponds to a particular sector partition, and the partition is weighted by its outage probability. In simulation examples, a hot spot scenario is simulated with the adaptive sectoring mechanism, and it is observed that load balancing between sectors is achieved and which greatly reduces the effect of hot spot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a small amount of software modification, wireless extension points (EPs), which are now commercially available, can be used to improve the throughput capacity of a wireless local area network (WLAN). An EP is an immobile device that has access to the power supply or is equipped with a high-capacity battery but does not have direct access to the Internet. They wirelessly relay data between the access point and the mobile hosts. In this paper, we investigate the optimal placement of the EPs such that the throughput capacity of an urban rectilineal WLAN can be maximized. Two channel models that are based on the Shannon capacity bound and IEEE 802.11 specifications are studied. We first formulate a solution for the optimal EP placement problem in a general network scenario as a nonlinear programming problem; then, we propose an efficient algorithm that determines the optimal locations of a fixed number of EPs in a rectilineal network. Our results show that, for a wide range of system parameters, the optimally placed EPs can significantly increase the network throughput capacity. Moreover, we study how the number of EPs, transmission power, path loss exponent, channel models, and traffic characteristics affect the optimal EP placement and expected throughput capacity of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel conditions in wireless local area networks (WLANs) are variable due to mobility and interference. Autorate algorithms are commonly used in WLANs to maximize the data rate over the variable physical channel. However, the widely used automatic rate fallback (ARF) algorithm does not work properly in the presence of multiaccess collisions due to its inability to differentiate frame losses caused by link errors from those caused by collisions. This paper proposes an improved ARF algorithm that is capable of differentiating between these two types of losses with minimal modifications to the existing medium access control protocol. The performance evaluations show substantial through-put improvements over ARF and other existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State-of-the-art vehicles are now being equipped with multiple video channels for video-data transmission from multiple surveillance cameras mounted on the automobile, navigation videos reporting the traffic conditions on the planned route, as well as entertainment-multimedia streaming for passengers watching on rear-seat monitors. Wireless LANs provide a low-cost and flexible infrastructure for these emerging in-vehicle multimedia services aimed at the driver's and passengers' safety, convenience, and entertainment. To enable the successful simultaneous deployment of such applications over in-vehicle wireless networks, we propose delay-sensitive streaming and packet-scheduling algorithms that enable simple, flexible, and efficient adaptation of the video bitstreams to the instantaneously changing video source and wireless-channel characteristics while complying with the a priori negotiated quality-of-service (QoS) parameters for that video service. Our focus is on real-time low-cost solutions for multimedia transmission over in-vehicle wireless networks that are derived based on existing protocols defined by QoS-enabled networks, such as the IEEE 802.11e standard. In addition, the aim of this paper is to couple the proposed solutions with a novel multitrack-hinting method that is proposed as an extension of conventional MP4 hint tracks in order to provide real-time adaptation of multimedia streams to multiple quality levels for different in-vehicle applications, depending on their importance and delay constraints. First, the scheduling constraints for these simultaneous wireless video-streaming sessions are analytically expressed as a function of the negotiated QoS parameters. This is imperative because a video stream received from an in-vehicle road-surveillance camera will have a different set of delay and quality constraints in comparison to that of traffic monitoring received from remote video cameras located on the planned route. Hence, transmission parameters, such as peak data rate, maximum burst size, minimum transmission delay, maximum error rate, etc., will differ for the various video streams. For this reason, new low-complexity packet-scheduling algorithms that can fulfill diverse QoS streaming conditions are proposed and analyzed. The proposed algorithms produce viable schedules (i.e., strictly QoS.compliant) that jointly consider the delay constraints and the in-vehicle video-receiver-buffer conditions. Hence, these scheduling schemes can completely avoid the underflow or overflow event of the receiving-device buffer while guaranteeing the agreement between the real-time video traffic and the predetermined traffic specification reached during QoS negotiation for various in-vehicle video channels. When combined with multitrack hinting, an integrated flexible system for adaptive multimedia streaming over QoS-enabled in-vehicle wireless networks can be constructed. We demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheduling mechanisms experimentally by using real video traces under multiple quality levels, as derived by the multitrack-hinting design. In addition, simulations under realistic conditions are also performed to validate the ability of the method to satisfy buffer-occupancy constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes task-scheduling algorithms designed to save energy in ad hoc networks by using a novel concept of "affinity" as the scheduling metric. This notion of affinity is used to represent the task-linking topology. For one-hop ad hoc networks, we define three types of affinity measures: node affinity, task affinity, and weighted affinity. Node affinity is defined as the weighted sum of incoming and outgoing task flows at each node, and task affinity as the sum of node affinities of source and destination nodes for each task. Based on these affinity measures, we consider three heuristic scheduling algorithms that are executable in real time: 1) affinity-first shortest task scheduling Qat; 2) task-size-first affinity-based scheduling Qta; and 3) task-size weighted-affinity scheduling Qwa. These algorithms have the advantage of making the total duration of the doze state of all the nodes in the network longer than in other conventional schemes, thereby achieving significant power saving (PS). Our simulation experiments suggest that the PS performance of Qwa is comparable to optimal scheduling (which is not implementable in practice for realistic link topologies). We also present a framework for a PS medium-access-control (MAC) protocol in which our scheduling algorithm can be deployed, and we describe how to enhance the existing 802.11 PS MAC to implement our framework. Simulation results demonstrate that our enhanced PS MAC protocol combined with affinity-based scheduling improves power efficiency and throughput significantly over other existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes task-scheduling algorithms designed to save energy in ad hoc networks by using a novel concept of "affinity" as the scheduling metric. This notion of affinity is used to represent the task-linking topology. For one-hop ad hoc networks, we define three types of affinity measures: node affinity, task affinity, and weighted affinity. Node affinity is defined as the weighted sum of incoming and outgoing task flows at each node, and task affinity as the sum of node affinities of source and destination nodes for each task. Based on these affinity measures, we consider three heuristic scheduling algorithms that are executable in real time: 1) affinity-first shortest task scheduling Qat; 2) task-size-first affinity-based scheduling Qta; and 3) task-size weighted-affinity scheduling Qwa. These algorithms have the advantage of making the total duration of the doze state of all the nodes in the network longer than in other conventional schemes, thereby achieving significant power saving (PS). Our simulation experiments suggest that the PS performance of Qwa is comparable to optimal scheduling (which is not implementable in practice for realistic link topologies). We also present a framework for a PS medium-access-control (MAC) protocol in which our scheduling algorithm can be deployed, and we describe how to enhance the existing 802.11 PS MAC to implement our framework. Simulation results demonstrate that our enhanced PS MAC protocol combined with affinity-based scheduling improves power efficiency and throughput significantly over other existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of providing throughput fairness in a wired-cum-wireless network where the wireless portion is an 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) is addressed. Due to the distributed nature of the primary 802.11 media access control protocol and the unpredictability of the wireless channel, quality of service guarantees in general and fairness in particular are hard to achieve in WLANs. This fact seriously compromises the interaction between 802.11-based networks and well-established architectures such as DiffServ. The focus of this paper is on transmission control protocol (TCP) traffic, and two fundamental problems related to throughput fairness are identified. First, the basic requirement of providing fair access to all users conflicts with the nature of TCP, which is fair only under certain conditions and hardly met by 802.11b WLANs. Second, short-lived TCP flows that are sensitive to losses during the early stages of TCP window growth need to be protected. To address these issues, a logical-link-control-layer algorithm that can be implemented at both access points and wireless stations is proposed. The algorithm aims at guaranteeing fair access to the medium to every user, independent of their channel conditions. At the same time, the proposed scheme protects short-lived flows, while they strive to get past the critical "small window regime." A simulation study that shows the effectiveness of the new algorithm in comparison to the standard 802.11b implementation is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distributed coordination function (DCF) of IEEE 802.11 standard adopts the binary exponential backoff (BEB) for collision avoidance. In DCF, the contention window is reset to an initial value, i.e., CWmin, after each successful transmission. Much research has shown that this dramatic change of window size may degrade the network performance. Therefore, backoff algorithms, such as gentle DCF (GDCF), multiplicative increase-linear decrease (MILD), exponential increase- exponential decrease (ELED), etc., have been proposed that try to keep the memory of congestion level by not resetting the contention window after each successful transmission. This paper proposes a multichain backoff (MCB) algorithm, which allows stations to adapt to different congestion levels by using more than one backoff chain together with collision events caused by stations themselves as well as other stations asindications for choosing the next backoff chain. The performance of MCB is analyzed and compared with those of 802.11 DCF, GDCF, MILD, and EIED backoff algorithms. Simulation results show that, with multiple backoff chains and collision events as reference for chain transition, MCB can offer a higher throughput while still maintaining fair channel access than the existing backoff algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an efficient symbol detection algorithm for space-frequency OFDM (SF-OFDM) transmit diversity scheme and present the implementation results of the SF-OFDM wireless LAN (WLAN) baseband processor with the proposed algorithm. When the number of sub-carriers in SF-OFDM scheme is small, the interference between adjacent sub-carriers is generated. The proposed algorithm eliminates this interference in a parallel manner and obtains a considerable performance improvement over the conventional detection algorithm. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed detection algorithm is evaluated by the simulation. In the case of 2 transmit and 2 receive antennas, at BER=10-4 the proposed algorithm obtains about 3 dB gain over the conventional detection algorithm. The packet error rate (PER), link throughput, and coverage performance of the SF-OFDM WLAN with the proposed detection algorithm are also estimated. For the target throughput at 80% of the peak data rate, the SF-OFDM WLAN achieves the average SNR gain of about 5.95 dB and the average coverage gain of 3.98 meter. The SF-OFDM WLAN baseband processor with the proposed algorithm was designed in a hardware description language and synthesized to gate-level circuits using 0.18μn 1.8V CMOS standard cell library. With the division-free architecture, the total logic gate count for the processor is 945K. The real-time operation is verified and evaluated using a FPGA test system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on directional antennas for both transmission and reception in wireless local area networks. Recently there has been strong interest in utilizing high-gain directional antennas for both transmission and reception in wireless ad hoc networks. Directional antennas provide longer transmission range and higher data rate, and reduce signal interference in unnecessary directions as well as jamming susceptibility, and lower probability of detection. Furthermore, they greatly increase spatial reuse since it is possible to schedule multiple node pair transmissions simultaneously. Thus, one expects a mobile wireless network equipped with smart antennas to significantly improve performance in terms of quality of service, and its ability to thwart jamming and detection by hostile entities. The realizable gains for a specific network, however, depend on the capabilities of the antennas, transceivers, and control algorithms in use. There are many papers on control algorithms in wireless ad hoc networks using directional antennas.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication techniques have been an important area of focus for next-generation wireless systems because of their potential for high capacity, increased diversity, and interference suppression. For applications such as wireless LANs and cellular telephony, MIMO systems will likely be deployed in environments where a single base must communicate with many users simultaneously. As a result, the study of multi-user MIMO systems has emerged recently as an important research topic. Such systems have the potential to combine the high capacity achievable with MIMO processing with the benefits of space-division multiple access. In this article we review several algorithms that have been proposed with this goal in mind. We describe two classes of solutions. The first uses a signal processing approach with various types of transmitter beamforming. The second uses "dirty paper" coding to overcome the interference a user sees from signals intended for other users. We conclude by describing future areas of research in multi-user MIMO communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]