Optimal Power Control, Scheduling and Routing in UWB Networks

Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) is an emerging wireless physical layer technology that uses a very large bandwidth. We are interested in finding the design objectives of the medium access (MAC, namely, power control and scheduling) and routing protocols of a multi-hop, best-effort, UWB network. The objective is to maximize flow rates (more precisely, log-utility of flow rates) given node power constraints. The specificity of UWB is expressed by the linear dependence between rate and signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. It is known that, in wireless networks, different routing strategies can imply differences in MAC protocol design, hence we search for the jointly optimal routing, scheduling and power control. We find that the optimal solution is characterized by the following. (1) When data is being sent over a link, it is optimal to have an exclusion region around the destination, in which all nodes remain silent during transmission, whereas nodes outside of this region can transmit in parallel, regardless of the interference they produce at the destination. Additionally, the source adapts its transmission rate according to the level of interference at the destination due to sources outside of the exclusion region. (2) The optimal size of this exclusion region depends only on the transmission power of the source of the link, and not on the size of the link nor on positions of nodes in its vicinity. (3) Each node in a given time slot either sends data at the maximum power, or does not send at all. As for the routing, we restrict to a subset of routes where on each successive hop we decrease the distance toward the destination, and we show that (4) relaying along a minimum energy and loss route is always better than using longer hops or sending directly, which is not obvious since we optimize rate and not power consumption. Finally (5), the design of the optimal MAC protocol is independent of the choice of the routing protocol. For narrow-band networks, (2), (4) and (5) do not hold, which shows that the design of an UWB network should be addressed in a different way than for narrow-band. Our technical approach is based on expressing the design requirements as a mathematical optimization problem. We solve it exactly for simple networks on a line and approximately on random topologies in a plane with up to 50 nodes with various power constraints, traffic matrices, and mobility parameters.

Jean-Yves Le Boudec

Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) is an emerging wireless physical layer technology that uses a very large bandwidth. We are interested in finding the design objectives of the medium access (MAC, namely, power control and scheduling) and routing protocols of a multi-hop, best-effort, UWB network. Our objective is to maximize flow rates (more precisely, log-utility of flow rates) given node power constraints. The specificity of UWB is expressed by the linear dependence between rate and signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. It is known that, in wireless networks, different routing strategies can imply differences in MAC protocol design. Hence we search for the jointly optimal routing, scheduling and power control. We find that the optimal solution is characterized by the following. (1) When data is being sent over a link, it is optimal to have an exclusion region around the destination, in which all nodes remain silent during transmission, whereas nodes outside of this region can transmit in parallel, regardless of the interference they produce at the destination. Additionally, the source adapts its transmission rate according to the level of interference at the destination due to sources outside of the exclusion region. (2) The optimal size of this exclusion region depends only on the transmission power of the source of the link, and not on the length of the link nor on positions of nodes in its vicinity. (3) Each node in a given time slot either sends data at the maximum power, or does not send at all. As for the routing, we restrict ourselves to a subset of routes where on each successive hop we decrease the distance toward the destination, and we show that (4) relaying along a minimum energy and loss route is always better than using longer hops or sending directly, which is not obvious since we optimize rate and not power consumption. Finally (5), the design of the optimal MAC protocol is independent of the choice of the routing protocol. For narrow-band networks, (2), (4) and (5) do not hold, which shows that the design of an UWB network should be addressed in a different way than for narrow-band. Our technical approach is based on expressing the design requirements as a mathematical optimization problem. We solve it exactly for simple networks on a line and approximately on random topologies in a plane with up to 50 nodes with various power constraints, traffic matrices, and mobility parameters.

2004

A cross-layer design of wireless ad-hoc networks

We consider a cross-layer design of wireless ad-hoc networks. Traditional networking approaches optimize separately each of the three layers: physical layer, medium access and routing. This may lead to largely suboptimal network designs. In this work, we propose a jointly optimal design of the three layers, and we show a significant performance improvement over the conventional approach. In the first part of this thesis, our goal is to select appropriate performance metrics for the joint optimization problem. To that respect, we analyze several existing rate-maximization performance metrics for wireless ad-hoc networks: maximizing the sum of rates, max-min fairness and proportional fairness. We first show with several examples that it is not clear if and how max-min fairness can be defined on each one of the examples. We give a formal proof that the max-min fair rate allocation exists on a large class of sets of feasible rates, among which are the feasible-rate sets of all known ad-hoc networking examples. We also give a centralized algorithm to compute the max-min fair allocation whenever it exists. Next, we compare the three metrics for ad-hoc scenarios in terms of efficiency and fairness. We prove that, similar to wired networking,maximizing the sum of rates leads to gross unfairness and starvation of all but the flows with the best channel conditions. We also prove that, contrary to wired networking, max-min fairness yields all flows having the same rate, thus causing large inefficiencies. These findings offer theoretical explanations to the inefficiency and unfairness phenomena previously observed in the contexts of 802.11 and UWB networks. Finally, we show that proportional fairness achieves a good trade-off between efficiency and fairness and is a good candidate for a rate-based performance metric in wireless ad-hoc settings. Having shown that the proportional fairness is an appropriate optimization objective for our problem, in the second part of the thesis we consider a joint optimization of rates, transmission powers, medium access (scheduling) and routing, where the goal of the optimization is to achieve proportional fairness. We first analyze networks built on physical layers that have a rate which is a linear function of SNR at the receiver (such as UWB or low-gain CDMA systems). We find that the optimal solution is characterized by the following principles: (1)Whenever a node transmits, it has to transmit with the maximum power; otherwise it has to remain silent (0 - PMAX power control). (2) Whenever data is being sent over a link, it is optimal to have an exclusion region around the destination, in which all nodes remain silent during transmission, whereas nodes outside of this region can transmit in parallel, regardless of the interference they produce at the destination. (3) When a source transmits, it adapts its transmission rate according to the level of interference at the destination due to sources transmitting in parallel. (4) The optimal size of this exclusion region depends only on the transmission power of the source of the link, and not on the length of the link nor on positions of nodes in its vicinity. As for the routing, we restrict ourselves to a subset of routes where on each successive hop we decrease the distance toward the destination. We also show that (5) relaying along a minimum energy and loss route is better than using longer hops or sending directly, which is not obvious since we optimize rate and not power consumption. Finally (6), the design of the optimal MAC protocol is independent of the choice of the routing protocol. We present a theoretical proof of optimality of 0 - PMAX power control, and the remaining findings we show numerically on a large number of random network topologies. Next, we consider narrow-band networks, where rate function is a strictly concave function of SNR. There, previous findings do not always hold. We show that in some cases, the size of the exclusion region and the optimal routing depend on transmission powers, and that the optimal MAC design depends on the choice of routing. Nevertheless, as we show with the example of 802.11 networks, a significant improvement over the existing 802.11 MAC can be achieved even with simpler, suboptimal strategies. Although this result is shown by simulations on a simplified model, it still gives further directions on how to improve the performance of RTS/CTS based protocols.

EPFL2005

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

A cross-layer design of wireless ad-hoc networks

EPFL2005

Optimal Power Control, Scheduling and Routing in UWB Networks

Jean-Yves Le Boudec

Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) is an emerging wireless physical layer technology that uses a very large bandwidth. We are interested in finding the design objectives of the medium access (MAC, namely, power control and scheduling) and routing protocols of a multi-hop, best-effort, UWB network. Our objective is to maximize flow rates (more precisely, log-utility of flow rates) given node power constraints. The specificity of UWB is expressed by the linear dependence between rate and signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. It is known that, in wireless networks, different routing strategies can imply differences in MAC protocol design. Hence we search for the jointly optimal routing, scheduling and power control. We find that the optimal solution is characterized by the following. (1) When data is being sent over a link, it is optimal to have an exclusion region around the destination, in which all nodes remain silent during transmission, whereas nodes outside of this region can transmit in parallel, regardless of the interference they produce at the destination. Additionally, the source adapts its transmission rate according to the level of interference at the destination due to sources outside of the exclusion region. (2) The optimal size of this exclusion region depends only on the transmission power of the source of the link, and not on the length of the link nor on positions of nodes in its vicinity. (3) Each node in a given time slot either sends data at the maximum power, or does not send at all. As for the routing, we restrict ourselves to a subset of routes where on each successive hop we decrease the distance toward the destination, and we show that (4) relaying along a minimum energy and loss route is always better than using longer hops or sending directly, which is not obvious since we optimize rate and not power consumption. Finally (5), the design of the optimal MAC protocol is independent of the choice of the routing protocol. For narrow-band networks, (2), (4) and (5) do not hold, which shows that the design of an UWB network should be addressed in a different way than for narrow-band. Our technical approach is based on expressing the design requirements as a mathematical optimization problem. We solve it exactly for simple networks on a line and approximately on random topologies in a plane with up to 50 nodes with various power constraints, traffic matrices, and mobility parameters.

2004