Ivan Wang Hei Ho

Impact of Power Control on Performance of IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

Optimizing spectral reuse is a major issue in large-scale IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Power control is an effective means for doing so. Much previous work simply assumes that each transmitter should use the minimum transmit power needed to reach its receiver, and that this would maximize the network capacity by increasing spectral reuse. It turns out that this is not necessarily the case, primarily because of hidden nodes. This paper shows that, in a network with power control, avoiding hidden nodes can achieve higher overall network capacity compared with the minimum-transmit-power approach. It is not always best to use the minimum transmit powers even from the network capacity viewpoint. Specifically, we propose and investigate two distributed adaptive power control algorithms that minimize mutual interferences among links while avoiding hidden nodes. Different power control schemes have different numbers of exposed nodes and hidden nodes, which in turn result in different network capacities and fairness. Although there is usually a fundamental trade-off between network capacity and fairness, we show that, interestingly, this is not always the case. In addition, our power control algorithms can operate at desirable network-capacity-fairness trade-off points and can boost the capacity of ordinary non-power-controlled 802.11 networks by two times while eliminating hidden nodes.

Stochastic model and connectivity dynamics for VANETs in signalized road systems

The space and time dynamics of moving vehicles regulated by traffic signals governs the node connectivity and communication capability of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in urban environments. However, none of the previous studies on node connectivity has considered such dynamics with the presence of traffic lights and vehicle interactions. In fact, most of them assume that vehicles are distributed homogeneously throughout the geographic area, which is unrealistic. We introduce in this paper a stochastic traffic model for VANETs in signalized urban road systems. The proposed model is a composite of the fluid model and stochastic model. The former characterizes the general flow and evolution of the traffic stream so that the average density of vehicles is readily computable, while the latter takes into account the random behavior of individual vehicles. As the key contribution of this paper, we attempt to approximate vehicle interactions and capture platoon formations and dissipations at traffic signals through a density-dependent velocity profile. The stochastic traffic model with approximation of vehicle interactions is evaluated with extensive simulations, and the distributional result of the model is validated against real-world empirical data in London. In general, we show that the fluid model can adequately describe the mean behavior of the traffic stream, while the stochastic model can approximate the probability distribution well even when vehicles interact with each other as their movement is controlled by traffic lights. With the knowledge of the mean vehicular density dynamics and its probability distribution from the stochastic traffic model, we determine the degree of connectivity in the communication network and illustrate that system engineering and planning for optimizing both the transport (in terms of congestion) and communication networks (in terms of connectivity) can be carried out with the proposed model.

Node Connectivity in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks with Structured Mobility

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) is a subclass of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). However, automotive ad hoc networks will behave in fundamentally different ways than the predominated models in MANET research. Driver behaviour, mobility constraints and high speeds create unique characteristics in the network. All of these constraints have implications on the VANET architecture at the physical, link, network, and application layers. To facilitate the cross-layer designs for VANETs, understanding of the relationship between mobility and network connectivity is of paramount importance. In this paper, we focus on studying transport systems with structured mobility (e.g., bus systems), which have unique characteristics on the road such as fixed routes that have never been explored in previous work. The main contributions of this paper are three-fold: 1) we provide an analytical framework including the design requirements of the mobility model for realistic vehicular network studies, and metrics for evaluating node connectivity in vehicular networks; 2) we demonstrate, through simulation, the impacts of marco- and micro-mobility models, and various transport elements on network connectivity; and 3) we show that multi-hop paths perform dramatically poorer than single-hop links in vehicular networks. Specifically, two- hop and three-hop (communication) paths can only respectively achieve less than 27% and 13% of the average duration of single-hop links. Such kind of knowledge of the performance of multi-hop transmission will be significant for the studies of routing algorithm and other networking functions in vehicular networks.

Analysis of Communication Network Performance From a Complex Network Perspective

In this paper we study the performance of communication networks from a network science perspective. Our analysis and simulation results reveal the effects of network structure, resource allocation and routing algorithm on the communication performance. Performance parameters, including packet drop rate, time delay, and critical generation rate, are considered. For efficient data transmission, the traffic load should be as uniformly distributed as possible in the network and the average distance of it should be short. We propose to use the node usage probability, which depends on both the network topology and routing algorithm, to characterize the traffic load distribution, and show that resource allocation based on the node usage probability outperforms the uniform and degree-based allocation scheme. On the basis of the proposal analysis and routing algorithms, we compare the performances of regular networks, scale-free networks, random networks, and the Internet constructed at the autonomous system (AS) level. Results from this study provide important insights into the relationship between the structural properties of communication networks and their performances.

Transmit power estimation using spatially diverse measurements under wireless fading

Received power measurements at spatially distributed monitors can be usefully exploited to deduce various characteristics of active wireless transmitters. In this paper, we study the problem of “blind” estimation of a wireless nodes transmit power utilizing solely received power measurements at spatially distributed monitors, without any prior knowledge about the transmitters location or any statistical characterization of its transmit power. We first consider a deterministic setup and utilize a geometrical approach to obtain fundamental limitations on estimating the transmit power and location of an unknown wireless node. We show that a regular placement of monitors, though appealing, does not provide sufficient measurement diversity to yield a unique estimate. We then extend the setup to consider wireless fading and present a theoretical analysis of maximum likelihood (ML) estimate, which is analytically shown to be asymptotically optimal. Finally, we provide numerical results comparing the performance of the estimator through simulations and on a dataset of field measurements.

A Methodology for Studying 802.11p VANET Broadcasting Performance With Practical Vehicle Distribution

In a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), the performance of the communication protocol is heavily influenced by the vehicular density dynamics. However, most of the previous works on VANET performance modeling paid little attention to vehicle distribution or simply assumed homogeneous car distribution. It is obvious that vehicles are distributed nonhomogeneously along a road segment due to traffic signals and speed limits at different portions of the road, as well as vehicle interactions that are significant on busy streets. In light of the inadequacy, in this paper, we present an original methodology to study the broadcasting performance of 802.11p VANETs with practical vehicle distribution in urban environments. First, we adopt the empirically verified stochastic traffic models, which incorporate the effect of urban settings (such as traffic lights and vehicle interactions) on car distribution and generate practical vehicular density profiles. Corresponding 802.11p protocol and performance models are then developed. When coupled with the traffic models, they can predict broadcasting efficiency, delay, and throughput performances of 802.11p VANETs based on the knowledge of car density at each location on the road. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the accuracy of the developed mathematical models with the consideration of vehicle interaction. In general, our results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology on modeling protocol performance in practical signalized road networks and shed insights into the design and development of future communication protocols and networking functions for VANETs.

Feasibility study of physical-layer network coding in 802.11p VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is expected to play a major role in improving road safety and traffic efficiency in peoples daily life. However, the main issue in VANETs remains to be intermittent node connectivity and relatively short contact duration due to the high mobility of vehicles. Physical-layer Network Coding (PNC) that enables data exchange within a much shorter airtime (e.g., twice faster than traditional scheduling) favors the highly-dynamic link condition in vehicular environments and hence appears to be a powerful tool in VANETs. One of the most important challenges in applying PNC to VANETs comes from the Doppler shift due to high-speed vehicle motion, which leads to carrier frequency offset (CFO) and hence introduces inter-carrier interference (ICI) that degrades the bit error rate performance. In this paper, we investigate the impact of motion-induced CFO/ICI on the overall signal detection. In particular, we study whether PNC in VANETs can be made feasible with conventional equalization techniques that suppress the effect of CFO. We found that PNC suffers only a 3 dB SINR penalty in the worst case compared with generic point-to-point (P2P) communications, and generally PNC is feasible in vehicular environments even if the transmission powers of source nodes cannot be finely controlled.

An Energy-Efficient Region-Based RPL Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

Routing plays an important role in the overall architecture of the Internet of Things. IETF has standardized the RPL routing protocol to provide the interoperability for low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). LLNs cover a wide scope of applications, such as building automation, industrial control, healthcare, and so on. LLNs applications require reliable and energy-efficient routing support. Point-to-point (P2P) communication is a fundamental requirement of many LLNs applications. However, traditional routing protocols usually propagate throughout the whole network to discover a reliable P2P route, which requires large amount energy consumption. Again, it is challenging to achieve both reliability and energy-efficiency simultaneously, especially for LLNs. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient region-based routing protocol (ER-RPL), which achieves energy-efficient data delivery without compromising reliability. In contrast of traditional routing protocols where all nodes are required for route discovery, the proposed scheme only requires a subset of nodes to do the job, which is the key of energy saving. Our theoretical analysis and extensive simulation studies demonstrate that ER-RPL has a great performance superiority over two conventional benchmark protocols, i.e., RPL and P2P-RPL.

Harnessing the High Bandwidth of Multiradio Multichannel 802.11n Mesh Networks

There has been an increasing interest in deploying wireless mesh networks (WMNs) for communication and video surveillance purposes thanks to its low cost and ease of deployment. It is well known that a major drawback of WMN is multihop bandwidth degradation, which is primarily caused by contention and radio interference. The use of mesh nodes with multiple radios and channels has been regarded as a straightforward solution to the problem in the research community. However, we demonstrate in this paper through real-world experiments that such an approach cannot resolve the multihop TCP throughput degradation problem in IEEE 802.11n mesh networks. With extensive experimentation, we verify that the degradation is principally caused by the increase in TCP Round-Trip Time (RTT) when the number of hops increases. TCP throughput is fundamentally limited inversely by the RTT. We find that the multihop TCP throughput (up to five hops) when using 802.11n is no better than when using 802.11a, despite the much higher data rate 802.11n. We attempt to use multiple parallel TCP connections as a remedy to the problem, and it turns out that the wireless bandwidth can be fully utilized with a sufficient number of parallel streams. In general, our results give a key message that TCP tuning (e.g., setting the correct TCP buffers and use of parallel streams) is of paramount importance in high-bandwidth multihop wireless mesh networks that employ the latest wireless standards. These tuning techniques have to be implemented into commercial products to fully leverage the ever advancing wireless technologies to support the growing demand of multihop communications in wireless mesh networks.

Cooperative transmit-power estimation under wireless fading

We study blind estimation of transmission power of a node based on received power measurements obtained under wireless fading. Specifically, the setup consists of a set of monitors that measure the signal power received from the transmitter, and the goal is to utilize these measurements to estimate the transmission power in the absence of any prior knowledge of the transmitters location or any statistical distribution of its power. Towards this end, we exploit spatial diversity in received-power measurements and cooperation among the multiple monitoring nodes; based on theoretical analysis we obtain the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimate, derive fundamental geometrical insights and show that this estimate is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we provide numerical results comparing the performance of the estimators through simulations and on a data-set of field measurements.