We consider the proportional fair rate allocation in an 802.11 WLAN that supports multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) transmission by one or more stations. We characterise, for the first time, the proportional fair allocation of MU-MIMO spatial streams and station transmission opportunities. While a number of features carry over from the case without MU-MIMO, in general neither flows nor stations need to be allocated equal airtime when MU-MIMO is available.
In @cite_6 the authors propose a novel MAC design with opportunistic MU-MIMO scheduling based on channel sounding feedback, where packets are selected depending on their transmission duration and type of traffic. In @cite_2 is also proposed a novel MAC design for MU-MIMO that focusses on issues such as MAC ACKing of MU-MIMO transmissions. Packets are scheduled for transmission using a weighted queuing mechanism that considers both packets acknowledgements and type of traffic. However, in both @cite_6 @cite_2 fairness and allocation of MU-MIMO transmission patterns amongst flows is not considered. The work in @cite_8 focusses on packet aggregation in an IEEE 802.11ac AP, and considers a fixed MU-MIMO schedule where one flow is allocated per spatial stream. Regarding utility fairness in WLANs, in @cite_1 is presented the first rigorous analysis of proportional fairness in 802.11 WLANs where transmissions are to a single destination.
@cite_8 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_2
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We consider the proportional fair rate allocation in an 802.11 WLAN that supports multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) transmission by one or more stations. We characterise, for the first time, the proportional fair allocation of MU-MIMO spatial streams and station transmission opportunities. While a number of features carry over from the case without MU-MIMO, in general neither flows nor stations need to be allocated equal airtime when MU-MIMO is available. The enormous success of advanced wireless devices is pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. Denser spectrum reuse through the deployment of more access points (APs) per square mile has the potential to successfully meet such demand. In principle, distributed multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) provides the best approach to infrastructure density increase since several access points are connected to a central server and operate as a large distributed multiantenna access point. This ensures that all transmitted signal power serves the purpose of data transmission, rather than creating interference. In practice, however, a number of implementation difficulties must be addressed, the most significant of which is aligning the phases of all jointly coordinated APs. In this paper, we propose AirSync, a novel scheme that provides timing and phase synchronization accurate enough to enable distributed MU-MIMO. AirSync detects the slot boundary such that all APs are time-synchronous within a cyclic prefix (CP) of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and predicts the instantaneous carrier phase correction along the transmit slot such that all transmitters maintain their coherence, which is necessary for multiuser beamforming. We have implemented AirSync as a digital circuit in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) of the WARP radio platform. Our experimental testbed, comprising four APs and four clients, shows that AirSync is able to achieve timing synchronization within the OFDM CP and carrier phase coherence within a few degrees. For the purpose of demonstration, we have implemented two MU-MIMO precoding schemes, Zero-Forcing Beamforming (ZFBF) and Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP). In both cases, our system approaches the theoretical optimal multiplexing gains. We also discuss aspects related to the MAC and multiuser scheduling design, in relation to the distributed MU-MIMO architecture. To the best of our knowledge, AirSync offers the first realization of the full distributed MU-MIMO multiplexing gain, namely the ability to increase the number of active wireless clients per time-frequency slot linearly with the number of jointly coordinated APs, without reducing the per client rate. Accurate analytical expressions of delay and packet reception probabilities, and energy consumption of duty-cycled wireless sensor networks with random medium access control (MAC) are instrumental for the efficient design and optimization of these resource-constrained networks. Given a clustered network topology with unslotted IEEE 802.15.4 and preamble sampling MAC, a novel approach to the modeling of the delay, reliability, and energy consumption is proposed. The challenging part in such a modeling is the random MAC and sleep policy of the receivers, which prevents to establish the exact time of data packet transmission. The analysis gives expressions as function of sleep time, listening time, traffic rate and MAC parameters. The analytical results are then used to optimize the duty cycle of the nodes and MAC protocol parameters. The approach provides a significant reduction of the energy consumption compared to existing solutions in the literature. Monte Carlo simulations by ns2 assess the validity of the analysis. We propose the cross-layer based opportunistic multi-channel medium access control (MAC) protocols, which integrate the spectrum sensing at physical (PHY) layer with the packet scheduling at MAC layer, for the wireless ad hoc networks. Specifically, the MAC protocols enable the secondary users to identify and utilize the leftover frequency spectrum in a way that constrains the level of interference to the primary users. In our proposed protocols, each secondary user is equipped with two transceivers. One transceiver is tuned to the dedicated control channel, while the other is designed specifically as a cognitive radio that can periodically sense and dynamically use the identified un-used channels. To obtain the channel state accurately, we propose two collaborative channel spectrum-sensing policies, namely, the random sensing policy and the negotiation-based sensing policy, to help the MAC protocols detect the availability of leftover channels. Under the random sensing policy, each secondary user just randomly selects one of the channels for sensing. On the other hand, under the negotiation-based sensing policy, different secondary users attempt to select the distinct channels to sense by overhearing the control packets over the control channel. We develop the Markov chain model and the M GY 1-based queueing model to characterize the performance of our proposed multi-channel MAC protocols under the two types of channel-sensing policies for the saturation network and the non-saturation network scenarios, respectively. In the non-saturation network case, we quantitatively identify the tradeoff between the aggregate traffic throughput and the packet transmission delay, which can provide the insightful guidelines to improve the delay-QoS provisionings over cognitive radio wireless networks. Explicit code constructions for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access channels (MAC) with K users are presented in this paper. The first construction is dedicated to the case of symmetric MIMO-MAC where all the users have the same number of transmit antennas nt and transmit at the same level of per-user multiplexing gain r. Furthermore, we assume that the users transmit in an independent fashion and do not cooperate. The construction is systematic for any values of K, nt and r. It is proved that this newly proposed construction achieves the optimal MIMO-MAC diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff (DMT) provided by Tse at high-SNR regime. In the second part of the paper we take a further step to investigate the MAC-DMT of a general MIMO-MAC where the users are allowed to have different numbers of transmit antennas and can transmit at different levels of multiplexing gain. The exact optimal MAC-DMT of such channel is explicitly characterized in this paper. Interestingly, in the general MAC-DMT, some users might not be able to achieve their single-user DMT performance as in the symmetric case, even when the multiplexing gains of the other users are close to 0. Detailed explanations of such unexpected result are provided in this paper. Finally, by generalizing the code construction for the symmetric MIMO-MAC, explicit code constructions are provided for the general MIMO-MAC and are proved to be optimal in terms of the general MAC-DMT. Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been emerging and attracting considerable attention recently for its potential to substantially improve system capacity via space division multiple access. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-user (MU) medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs) with MIMO capability, using a leakage-based preceding scheme. By exploiting the multi-user degree of freedom in a MIMO system to allow the access point (AP) to communicate with multiple users in the same frequency band simultaneously, the proposed MU MAC can effectively minimize the AP-bottleneck effect in legacy WLANs. We then develop an analytical model to study the performance of the proposed MU MAC, in terms of the maximum number of users that can be supported and the network throughput. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed MU MAC significantly outperforms the single-user MAC. This paper addresses the problem of fairness in wireless ad-hoc networks. Usually, the problem of fairness in wireless ad-hoc networks is addressed in a classic approach inherited from wired networks. The common assumption is that nodes flows have pre-assigned fair shares. The task becomes then to modify wired networks' fair queueing algorithms to address wireless network nature. Wired networks have efficient means of allocating fiar shares through admission control and additionally, the fair shares remain constant throughout the session duration due to the static nature of the nodes. In ad-hoc networks, it is meaningless to assume statically pre-assigned fair shares, since on one hand, not only the nodes move, but also the routers are mobile, and on the other hand, contention is location dependent, such that in terms of absolute guarantees, fairness would at most mean "avoiding starvation": thus applying rate proportional fiar queueing algorithms is beyond the original goal of such algorithm, viz. flow isolation protection and bandwidth guarantee. In this work we argue in favor of multi-level scheduling for wireless ad-hoc networks with max-min fair allocation of the fair shares at the lower-most layer (MAC layer). This paper, mainly lays down the theoretical framework by which one can calculate the fair shares that would achieve max-min fairness in an ad-hoc network. We design distributed algorithms that allow each node to determine its max-min per-link fair share in a global ad-hoc network without knowledge of the global topology of the network. The results are then used in conjunction with a novel practical scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.11 to show how fairness is achieved Downlink scheduling schemes are well-known and widely investigated under the assumption that the channel state is perfectly known to the scheduler. In the multiuser MIMO (broadcast) case, downlink scheduling in the presence of non-perfect channel state information (CSI) is only scantly treated. In this paper we provide a general framework that addresses the problem systematically. Also, we illuminate the key role played by the channel state prediction error: our scheme treats in a fundamentally different way users with small channel prediction error ("predictable" users) and users with large channel prediction error ("non-predictable" users), and can be interpreted as a near-optimal opportunistic time-sharing strategy between MIMO downlink beamforming to predictable users and space-time coding to non-predictable users. Our results, based on a realistic MIMO channel model used in 3GPP standardization, show that the proposed algorithms can significantly outperform a conventional "mismatched" scheduling scheme that treats the available CSI as if it was perfect. Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) networks reveal the unique opportunities arising from a joint optimization of antenna combining techniques with resource allocation protocols. Furthermore, it brings robustness with respect to multipath richness, allowing for compact antenna spacing at the BS and, crucially, yielding the diversity and multiplexing gains without the need for multiple antenna user terminals. To realize these gains, however, the BS should be informed with the user's channel coefficients, which may limit practical application to TDD or low-mobility settings. To circumvent this problem and reduce feedback load, combining MU-MIMO with opportunistic scheduling seems a promising direction. The success for this type of scheduler is strongly traffic and QoS-dependent, however. This paper studies the use of the proportional fairness (PF) utility function as the basis for capacity allocation and scheduling in multi-channel multi-rate wireless networks. Examples of applications include (i) access point (AP) association and transmission scheduling in large-scale IEEE 802.11 networks; and (ii) subcarrier assignment and transmission scheduling in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) cellular networks. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we study the fundamental properties and physical economic interpretation of PF. We show by general mathematical arguments that PF leads to equal airtime allocation to individual users for the single-channel case; and equal equivalent airtime allocation to individual users for the multi-channel case, where the equivalent airtime enjoyed by a user is a weighted sum of the airtimes enjoyed by the user on all channels, with the weight of a channel being the price or value of that channel. In addition, we establish the Pareto efficiency of PF solutions and derive characteristics of PF solutions that are useful for the construction of PF algorithms. Second, we generate numerical results for application (i) above. We find that the PF solution simultaneously achieves higher system throughput, better fairness, and lower outage probability with respect to the default AP-association and medium access control (MAC) protocol adopted in today's 802.11 commercial products. In this paper, we explore the utility of recently discovered multiple-antenna techniques (namely MIMO techniques) for medium access control (MAC) design and routing in mobile ad hoc networks. Specifically, we focus on ad hoc networks where the spatial diversity technique is used to combat fading and achieve robustness in the presence of user mobility. We first examine the impact of spatial diversity on the MAC design, and devise a MIMO MAC protocol accordingly. We then develop analytical methods to characterize the corresponding saturation throughput for MIMO multi-hop networks. Building on the throughout analysis, we study the impact of MIMO MAC on routing. We characterize the optimal hop distance that minimizes the end-to-end delay in a large network. For completeness, we also study MAC design using directional antennas for the case where the channel has a strong line of sight (LOS) component. Our results show that the spatial diversity technique and the directional antenna technique can enhance the performance of mobile ad hoc networks significantly. Spatial multiple access holds the promise to boost the capacity of wireless networks when an access point has multiple antennas. Due to the asynchronous and uncontrolled nature of wireless LANs, conventional MIMO technology does not work efficiently when concurrent transmissions from multiple stations are uncoordinated. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a crosslayer system, called SAM, that addresses the challenges of enabling spatial multiple access for multiple devices in a random access network like WLAN. SAM uses a chain-decoding technique to reliably recover the channel parameters for each device, and iteratively decode concurrent frames with misaligned symbol timings and frequency offsets. We propose a new MAC protocol, called CCMA, to enable concurrent transmissions by different mobile stations while remaining backward compatible with 802.11. Finally, we implement the PHY and MAC layer of SAM using the Sora high-performance software radio platform. Our evaluation results under real wireless conditions show that SAM can improve network uplink throughput by 70 with two antennas over 802.11. In this paper, we consider the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol design for full-duplex cognitive radio networks (FDCRNs). Our design exploits the fact that full-duplex (FD) secondary users (SUs) can perform spectrum sensing and access simultaneously, which enable them to detect the primary users' (PUs) activity during transmission. The developed FD MAC protocol employs the standard backoff mechanism as in the 802.11 MAC protocol. However, we propose to adopt the frame fragmentation during the data transmission phase for timely detection of active PUs where each data packet is divided into multiple fragments and the active SU makes sensing detection at the end of each data fragment. Then, we develop a mathematical model to analyze the throughput performance of the proposed FD MAC protocol. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm to configure the MAC protocol so that efficient self-interference management and sensing overhead control can be achieved. Finally, numerical results are presented to evaluate the performance of our design and demonstrate the throughput enhancement compared to the existing half-duplex (HD) cognitive MAC protocol. This paper characterizes the performance in terms of queueing stability of a network composed of multiple MIMO transmitter-receiver pairs taking into account the dynamic traffic pattern and the probing feedback cost. We adopt a centralized scheduling scheme that selects a number of active pairs in each time-slot. We consider that the transmitters apply interference alignment (IA) technique if two or more pairs are active, whereas in the special case where one pair is active point-to-point MIMO singular value decomposition (SVD) is used. We consider a time-division duplex (TDD) system where transmitters acquire their channel state information (CSI) by decoding the pilot sequences sent by the receivers. Since global CSI knowledge is required for IA, the transmitters have also to exchange their estimated CSIs over a backhaul of limited capacity (i.e. imperfect case). Under this setting, we characterize in this paper the stability region of the system under both the imperfect and perfect (i.e. unlimited backhaul) cases, then we examine the gap between these two resulting regions. Further, under each case we provide a centralized probing policy that achieves the max stability region. These stability regions and scheduling policies are given for the symmetric system, where all the path loss coefficients are equal to each other, as well as for the general system. For the symmetric system, we provide the conditions under which IA yields a queueing stability gain compared to SVD. Under the general system, the adopted scheduling policy is of a high computational complexity for moderate numbers of pairs, consequently we propose an approximate policy that has a reduced complexity but that achieves only a fraction of the system stability region. A characterization of this fraction is provided. One critical issue in multihop ad hoc networks is the medium access control (MAC). The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is originally designed for fully connected, one-hop ad hoc networks but not for multihop ad hoc networks. In addition to the well known hidden-terminal problem, we found that IEEE 802.11 also suffers from an erroneous reservation problem which occurs when RTS-CTS exchange fails but the channel is incorrectly reserved. In this paper, we propose a jamming-based MAC (JMAC) protocol that is not only free from both hidden-terminal and the erroneous reservation problems but also allows more concurrent transmission reception activities for stations within each other's transmission range. The idea behind the JMAC is to separate source stations' traffic from destination stations' traffic into different channels (i.e., dividing the shared medium into two channels), and explicitly signal the channel status by jamming the channels. Simulation results show that the JMAC can provide higher channel utilization when system is in high traffic load and the frame size is medium or large. We consider a MIMO multicell system wherein several Mobile Users (MUs) ask for computation offloading to a common cloud server through their femto-access points. We formulate the computation offloading problem as a joint optimization of the radio resources??the transmit precoding matrices of the MUs??and the computational resources??the CPU cycles second assigned by the cloud to each MU??in order to minimize the overall users' energy consumption while meeting the latency constraints imposed by the applications running on the MUs. The resulting optimization problem is nonconvex (in the objective function and the constraints), and there are constraints coupling all the optimization variables. To cope with the nonconvexity, we hinge on successive convex approximation techniques and propose an iterative algorithm converging to a local optimal solution of the original nonconvex problem. The algorithm is also suitable for a parallel implementation across the access point, with limited coordination signaling with the cloud. Numerical results show that the proposed joint optimization yields significant energy savings with respect to more traditional schemes performing a separate optimization of the radio and computational resources. We study the problem of distributed scheduling in multi-hop MIMO networks. We first develop a MIMO-pipe" model that provides the upper layers a set of rates and SINR requirements, which capture the rate-reliability tradeoff in MIMO communications. The main thrust of this study is then dedicated to developing CSMA-based MIMO-pipe scheduling under the SINR model. We choose the SINR model over the extensively studied matching or protocol-based interference models because it more naturally captures the impact of interference in wireless networks. The coupling among the links caused by the interference makes the problem of devising distributed scheduling algorithms particularly challenging. To that end, we explore CSMA-based MIMO-pipe scheduling, from two perspectives. First, we consider an idealized continuous time CSMA network. We propose a dual-band approach in which control messages are exchanged instantaneously over a channel separate from the data channel, and show that CSMA-based scheduling can achieve throughput optimality under the SINR model. Next, we consider a discrete time CSMA network. To tackle the challenge due to the coupling caused by interference, we propose a conservative" scheduling algorithm in which more stringent SINR constraints are imposed based on the MIMO-pipe model. We show that this suboptimal distributed scheduling can achieve an efficiency ratio bounded from below. In upcoming very high-speed wireless LANs (WLANs), the physical (PHY) layer rate may reach 600 Mbps. To achieve high efficiency at the medium access control (MAC) layer, we identify fundamental properties that must be satisfied by any CSMA- CA-based MAC layers and develop a novel scheme called aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) that exhibits these properties. In the AFR scheme, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame. If errors happen during the transmission, only the corrupted fragments of the large frame are retransmitted. An analytic model is developed to evaluate the throughput and delay performance of AFR over noisy channels and to compare AFR with similar schemes in the literature. Optimal frame and fragment sizes are calculated using this model. Transmission delays are minimized by using a zero-waiting mechanism where frames are transmitted immediately once the MAC wins a transmission opportunity. We prove that zero-waiting can achieve maximum throughput. As a complement to the theoretical analysis, we investigate the impact of AFR on the performance of realistic application traffic with diverse requirements by simulations. We have implemented the AFR scheme in the NS-2 simulator and present detailed results for TCP, VoIP, and HDTV traffic. The AFR scheme described was developed as part of the IEEE 802.11n working group work. The analysis presented here is general enough to be extended to proposed schemes in the upcoming 802.11n standard. Trends indicated in this paper should extend to any well-designed aggregation schemes. Consider a downlink MIMO heterogeneous wireless network with multiple cells, each containing many mobile users and a number of base stations with varying capabilities. A central task in the management of such a network is to assign each user to a base station and design a linear transmit strategy to ensure a satisfactory level of network performance. In this work, we propose a formulation for the joint base station assignment and linear transceiver design problem based on the maximization of a system wide utility. We first establish the NP-hardness of the resulting optimization problem for a large family of α-fairness utility functions. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to approximately solve this problem for a variety of different utility functions. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm can achieve significantly higher levels of system throughput and user fairness than what is possible by optimizing the precoders alone. Summary One critical issue in multihop ad-hoc networks is the medium access control (MAC). The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is originally designed for fully connected, one-hop ad-hoc networks but not for multihop ad-hoc networks. In addition to the well known hidden-terminal problem, we found that IEEE 802.11 also suffers from an erroneous reservation problem which occurs when RTS-CTS exchange fails but the channel is incorrectly reserved. In this paper, we propose a jamming-based MAC (JMAC) protocol that is not only free from both the hiddenterminal and the erroneous reservation problems but also allows more concurrent transmission receipt activities for stations within each other’s transmission range. The idea behind the JMAC is to separate source stations’ traffic from destination stations’ traffic into different channels (i.e. dividing the shared medium into two channels), and explicitly signal the channel status by jamming the channels. Simulation results show that although the channel division incurs some cost, the advantages of being free from the erroneous reservation and the hidden-terminal problems, and the benefits of more concurrent transmissions will compensate the cost and provide higher channel utilization when data frame size is median or large. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.