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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]

A key issue in physical-layer network coding (PNC) is how to deal with the asynchrony between signals transmitted by multiple transmitters. That is, symbols transmitted by different transmitters could arrive at the receiver with symbol misalignment as well as relative carrier-phase offset. A second important issue is how to integrate channel coding with PNC to achieve reliable communication. This paper investigates these two issues and makes the following contributions: 1) We propose and investigate a general framework for decoding at the receiver based on belief propagation (BP). The framework can effectively deal with symbol and phase asynchronies while incorporating channel coding at the same time. 2) For unchannel-coded PNC, we show that for BPSK and QPSK modulations, our BP method can significantly reduce the asynchrony penalties compared with prior methods. 3) For QPSK unchannel-coded PNC, with a half symbol offset between the transmitters, our BP method can drastically reduce the performance penalty due to phase asynchrony, from more than 6 dB to no more than 1 dB. 4) For channel-coded PNC, with our BP method, both symbol and phase asynchronies actually improve the system performance compared with the perfectly synchronous case. Furthermore, the performance spread due to different combinations of symbol and phase offsets between the transmitters in channel-coded PNC is only around 1 dB. The implication of 3) is that if we could control the symbol arrival times at the receiver, it would be advantageous to deliberately introduce a half symbol offset in unchannel-coded PNC. The implication of 4) is that when channel coding is used, symbol and phase asynchronies are not major performance concerns in PNC. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the problem of energy conservation of mobile terminals in a multi-cell TDMA network supporting real-time sessions. The corresponding optimization problem involves joint scheduling, rate control, and power control, which is often highly complex to solve. To reduce the solution complexity, we decompose the overall problem into two sub-problems: intra-cell energy optimization and inter-cell interference control. The solution of the two subproblems results in a "win-win" situation: both the energy consumptions and inter-cell interference are reduced simultaneously. We simulate our decomposition method with the typical parameters in WiMAX system, and the simulation results show that our decomposition method can achieve an energy reduction of more than 70% compared with the simplistic maximum transmit power policy. Furthermore, the inter-cell interference power can be reduced by more than 35% compared with the maximum transmit power policy. We find that the interference power stays largely constant throughout a TDMA frame in our decomposition method. Based on this premise, we derive an interesting decoupling property: if the idle power consumption of terminals is no less than their circuit power consumption, or when both are negligible, then the energy-optimal transmission rates of the users are independent of the inter-cell interference power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]