Effect of power randomization on saturation throughput of IEEE 802.11 WLAN

In this paper, we evaluate the saturation throughput for an IEEE 802.11 based wireless network considering capture effect at the receiver, while nodes transmit with random powers. In this respect, we consider a scenario consisting of a specific number of wireless nodes. Then, we derive the transmission as well as collision probabilities with respect to the perfect capture effect. In order to maximize the saturation throughput we set up an optimization problem and obtain how to compute optimum values for the probabilities corresponding to different power levels. By providing the numerical results, we deduce that power randomization may lead to a significant improvement in saturation throughput.

Rate Performance Objectives of Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Jean-Yves Le Boudec

We consider the question of what performance metric to maximize when designing adhoc wireless network protocols such as routing or MAC. We focus on maximizing rates under battery lifetime and power constraints. Commonly used metrics are total capacity (in the case of cellular networks) and transport capacity (in the case of adhoc networks). However, it is known in traditional wired networking that maximizing total capacity conflicts with fairness, and this is why fairness oriented rate allocations, such as max-min fairness, are often used. We review this issue for wireless ad-hoc networks. Indeed, the mathematical model for wireless networks has a specificity that makes some of the findings different. It has been reported in the literature on Ultra Wide Band that gross unfairness occurs when maximizing total capacity or transport capacity, and we confirm by a theoretical analysis that this is a fundamental shortcoming of such metrics in wireless ad-hoc networks, as it is for wired networks. The story is different for max-min fairness. Although it is perfectly viable for a wired network, it is much less so in our setting. We show that, in the limit of long battery lifetime, the max-min allocation of rates always leads to strictly equal rates, regardless of the MAC layer, network topology, choice of routes and power constraints. This is due to the ``solidarity

2004

Why Max-min Fairness Is Not Suitable For Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

Jean-Yves Le Boudec

We consider the issue of which criteria to use when evaluating the design of a wireless multihop network. It is known, and we illustrate in this paper, that maximizing the total capacity, or transport capacity, leads to gross imbalance and is not suitable. An alternative, which is often used in networking, is to consider the max-min fair allocation of rates, or of transport rates per node. We apply max-min fairness to the class of wireless, multi-hop networks for which the rate of a wireless link is an increasing functions of signal-to-noise ratio. This class includes CDMA and UWB. We show that, for a network in this class, the max-min fair allocation of bit or transport rates always gives the same rate to all flows. We show on one example that such an allocation is highly undesirable when the network is asymmetric. Another form of fairness, utility fairness, does not appear to have the same problem.

2003

Low Complexity Scheduling and Coding for Wireless Networks

Siddhartha Brahma

The advent of wireless communication technologies has created a paradigm shift in the accessibility of communication. With it has come an increased demand for throughput, a trend that is likely to increase further in the future. A key aspect of these challenges is to develop low complexity algorithms and architectures that can take advantage of the nature of the wireless medium like broadcasting and physical layer cooperation. In this thesis, we consider several problems in the domain of low complexity coding, relaying and scheduling for wireless networks. We formulate the Pliable Index Coding problem that models a server trying to send one or more new messages over a noiseless broadcast channel to a set of clients that already have a subset of messages as side information. We show through theoretical bounds and algorithms, that it is possible to design short length codes, poly-logarithmic in the number of clients, to solve this problem. The length of the codes are exponentially better than those possible in a traditional index coding setup. Next, we consider several aspects of low complexity relaying in half-duplex diamond networks. In such networks, the source transmits information to the destination through

n

half-duplex intermediate relays arranged in a single layer. The half-duplex nature of the relays implies that they can either be in a listening or transmitting state at any point of time. To achieve high rates, there is an additional complexity of optimizing the schedule (i.e. the relative time fractions) of the relaying states, which can be

2^n

in number. Using approximate capacity expressions derived from the quantize-map-forward scheme for physical layer cooperation, we show that for networks with

n\leq 6

relays, the optimal schedule has atmost

n+1

active states. This is an exponential improvement over the possible

2^n

active states in a schedule. We also show that it is possible to achieve at least half the capacity of such networks (approximately) by employing simple routing strategies that use only two relays and two scheduling states. These results imply that the complexity of relaying in half-duplex diamond networks can be significantly reduced by using fewer scheduling states or fewer relays without adversely affecting throughput. Both these results assume centralized processing of the channel state information of all the relays. We take the first steps in analyzing the performance of relaying schemes where each relay switches between listening and transmitting states randomly and optimizes their relative fractions using only local channel state information. We show that even with such simple scheduling, we can achieve a significant fraction of the capacity of the network. Next, we look at the dual problem of selecting the subset of relays of a given size that has the highest capacity for a general layered full-duplex relay network. We formulate this as an optimization problem and derive efficient approximation algorithms to solve them. We end the thesis with the design and implementation of a practical relaying scheme called QUILT. In it the relay opportunistically decodes or quantizes its received signal and transmits the resulting sequence in cooperation with the source. To keep the complexity of the system low, we use LDPC codes at the source, interleaving at the relays and belief propagation decoding at the destination. We evaluate our system through testbed experiments over WiFi.

EPFL2015