Okhwan Lee

Available bandwidth-based association in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

The performance of an IEEE 802.11 station heavily depends on the selection of an AP (Access Point) that the station is associated with to access the Internet. The conventional approach to the AP selection is based on the received signal strength called RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) from APs within the transmission range. This approach however, might yield unbalanced traffic load among APs as the station chooses an AP only based on the signal strength, instead of considering the AP load and the level of contention on medium access. Accordingly, the station that is associated with the highest-RSSI AP might suffer from poor network performance. In this paper, we propose a new association metric, EVA (Estimated aVailable bAndwidth) with which a station can find the AP that provides the maximum achievable throughput among scanned APs. EVA is designed to estimate the available bandwidth on a channel with respect to a station that is to join a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network). A station equipped with EVA observes a channel state in a per-slot basis, and yet does not request any external information from nearby APs or neighbor stations. Our estimation mechanism is non-intrusive, fully distributed, and independent of the infrastructure. Through simulation study, we evaluate the accuracy of the estimation and show that EVA-based association yields enhanced throughput performance compared with the legacy scheme.

Wi-Fi could be much more

Wi-Fi has become an essential wireless technology in our daily lives, although the original intention of its introduction was to replace Ethernet cable. In this article, we outline the most remarkable features introduced during its ongoing technological evolution in terms of three major directions: throughput enhancement, longrange extension, and greater ease of use. By stitching these advanced features together, we also envision a promising future that Wi-Fi technology will bring us in terms of spectrum heterogeneity, seamless service provisioning, and possible relations with cellular networks.

Comparative analysis of link quality metrics and routing protocols for optimal route construction in wireless mesh networks

We provide a comparative analysis of various routing strategies that affect the end-to-end performance in wireless mesh networks. We first improve well-known link quality metrics and routing algorithms to enhance performance in wireless mesh environments. We then investigate the route optimality, i.e., whether the best end-to-end route with respect to a given link quality metric is established, and its impact on the network performance. Network topologies, number of concurrent flows, and interference types are varied in our evaluation and we find that a non-optimal route is often established because of the routing protocols misbehavior, inaccurate link metric design, interflow interference, and their interplay. Through extensive simulation analysis, we present insights on how to design wireless link metrics and routing algorithms to enhance the network capacity and provide reliable connectivity.

MoFA: Mobility-aware Frame Aggregation in Wi-Fi

IEEE 802.11n WLAN supports frame aggregation called aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU) as a key MAC technology to achieve high throughput. While it has been generally accepted that aggregating more subframes results in higher throughput by reducing protocol overheads, our measurements reveal various situations where the use of long A-MPDU frames frequently leads to poor performance in time-varying environments. Especially, since mobility intensifies the time-varying nature of the wireless channel, the current method of channel estimation conducted only at the beginning of a frame reception is insufficient to ensure robust delivery of long A-MPDU frames. Based on extensive experiments, we develop MoFA, a standard-compliant mobility-aware A-MPDU length adaptation scheme with ease of implementation. Our prototype implementation in commercial 802.11n devices shows that MoFA achieves the throughput 1.8x higher than a fixed duration setting (i.e., 10 ms, the maximum frame duration according to IEEE 802.11n standard). To our best knowledge, this is the first effort to optimize the A-MPDU length for commercial 802.11n.

Adaptive two-level frame aggregation in IEEE 802.11n WLAN

In order to reduce the overhead of legacy WLANs, the IEEE 802.11n standard defines two aggregation schemes, i.e., A-MSDU and A-MPDU. In general, A-MPDU outperforms A-MSDU due to its selective retransmission capability. However, A-MPDU has a fundamental restriction on the minimum separation in time between the start of two consecutive subframes carried on the same A-MPDU. If such a gap is smaller than the minimum MPDU start spacing of the receiver, the sender should insert additional padding, thus resulting in throughput degradation. The main contribution of this paper is that we provide an adaptive aggregation scheme in which the sender conveys A-MSDUs within A-MPDUs in an adaptive manner, in order to resolve this potential problem in A-MPDU. Our analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves throughput performance over A-MPDU and A-MSDU by up to 280% and 19%, respectively.

MAC-aware routing metric for 802.11 wireless mesh networks

We develop a new wireless link quality metric, ECOT (Estimated Channel Occupancy Time) that enables a high throughput route setup in wireless mesh networks. The key feature of ECOT is being applicable to diverse mesh network environments where IEEE 802.11 MAC (Medium Access Control) variants are used. We take into account the detailed operational features of various 802.11 MAC protocols, such as 802.11 DCF (Distributed Coordination Function), 802.11e EDCA (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access) with BACK (Block Acknowledgment), and 802.11n A-MPDU (Aggregate MAC Protocol Data Unit), and derive an integrated link metric that enables finding maximum throughput end-to-end routes. Through simulations in randomized topological environments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed link metric and routing strategy to demonstrate that our proposed schemes can achieve up to 354.4% throughput gain over existing ones.

WiZizz: Energy efficient bandwidth management in IEEE 802.11ac wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a new power save operation as well as the corresponding protocol, called WiFi in Zizz (WiZizz), which judiciously exploits the characteristic of the channel bonding defined in IEEE 802.11ac and efficiently handles the channel bandwidth in an on-demand manner to minimize the traumatic energy spent by IEEE 802.11ac devices. Our extensive measurement and simulation show significant performance improvement (up to 73% energy saving) over a wide range of communication scenarios. In addition, the feasibility of easy implementation is demonstrated by a prototype with a commercial 802.11ac device. To the best of our knowledge, WiZizz is the first IEEE 802.11ac-congenial energy efficient bandwidth management while other existing approaches require costly modifications of the IEEE 802.11ac specification.

SIRA: SNR-Aware Intra-Frame Rate Adaptation

An intra-frame rate control algorithm (Intra-RCA), called SNR-aware Intra-frame Rate Adaption (SIRA), is proposed to enhance the system performance of WiFi in fast time-varying environments. Widely used inter-frame rate control algorithms (Inter-RCA), which select the physical layer (PHY) rate of each frame based on the time averaged frame loss rate and the signal strength statistics, perform poorly for a long aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU) due to the channel variation in mobile environments. Unlike the previous approaches, SIRA adapts the PHY rate on intra-frame basis, i.e., the PHY rate is updated in the middle of a frame according to user mobility. The performance of the proposed scheme is also evaluated by a trace-driven link level simulator employing the collected channel traces from real measurements. The simulation results show that SIRA outperforms the standalone Inter-RCA in all tested traces.

ChASER: Channel-aware symbol error reduction for high-performance WiFi systems in dynamic channel environment

Due to considerable increases in user mobility and frame length through aggregation, the wireless channel remains no longer time-invariant during the (aggregated) frame transmission time. However, the existing IEEE 802.11 standards still define the channel estimation to be performed only once at the preamble for coherent OFDM receivers, and the same channel information to be used throughout the entire (aggregated) frame processing. Our experimental results reveal that this baseline channel estimation approach seriously deteriorates the WiFi performance, especially for pedestrian mobile users and the recently adopted frame aggregation scheme. In this paper, we propose Channel-Aware Symbol Error Reduction (ChASER), a new practical channel estimation and tracking scheme for WiFi receivers. ChASER utilizes the re-encoding and re-modulation of the received data symbol to keep up with the wireless channel dynamics at the granularity of OFDM symbols. Our extensive, trace-driven link-level simulation shows significant performance gains over a wide range of channel conditions based on the real wireless channel traces collected by the off-the-shelf WiFi device. In addition, the feasibility of its low-complexity and standard compliance is demonstrated by Microsofts Software Radio (Sora) prototype implementation and experimentation. To our knowledge, ChASER is the first IEEE 802.11n-compatible channel tracking algorithm since other approaches addressing the time-varying channel conditions over a single (aggregated) frame duration require costly modifications of the IEEE 802.11n standard.

On optimal route construction in wireless mesh networks

We provide a comparative analysis of various routing strategies that affect the end-to-end performance in wireless mesh networks. We first improve well-known link quality metrics and routing algorithms to better operate in wireless mesh environments. We then investigate the route optimality and its impact on the network performance by comparing the achieved end-to-end performance with the optimal offline routing. Various network topologies, number of concurrent flows, and interference types are considered in our evaluation and we reveal that a nonoptimal route is easily established because of routing protocols misbehavior, interflow interference, and their interplay, thus affecting the end-to-end performance.