No Arabic abstract
Contention-based wireless channel access methods like CSMA and ALOHA paved the way for the rise of the Internet of Things in industrial applications (IIoT). However, to cope with increasing demands for reliability and throughput, several mostly TDMA-based protocols like IEEE 802.15.4 and its extensions were proposed. Nonetheless, many of these IIoT-protocols still require contention-based communication, e.g., for slot allocation and broadcast transmission. In many cases, subtle but hidden patterns characterize this secondary traffic. Present contention-based protocols are unaware of these hidden patterns and can therefore not exploit this information. Especially in dense networks, they often do not provide sufficient reliability for primary traffic, e.g., they are unable to allocate transmission slots in time. In this paper, we propose QMA, a contention-based multiple access scheme based on Q-learning, which dynamically adapts transmission times to avoid collisions by learning patterns in the contention-based traffic. QMA is designed to be resource-efficient and targets small embedded devices. We show that QMA solves the hidden node problem without the additional overhead of RTS / CTS messages and verify the behaviour of QMA in the FIT IoT-LAB testbed. Finally, QMAs scalability is studied by simulation, where it is used for GTS allocation in IEEE 802.15.4 DSME. Results show that QMA considerably increases reliability and throughput in comparison to CSMA/CA, especially in networks with a high load.
This paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates a first wireless local area network (WLAN) system that jointly exploits physical-layer network coding (PNC) and multiuser decoding (MUD) to boost system throughput. We refer to this multiple access mode as Network-Coded Multiple Access (NCMA). Prior studies on PNC mostly focused on relay networks. NCMA is the first realized multiple access scheme that establishes the usefulness of PNC in a non-relay setting. NCMA allows multiple nodes to transmit simultaneously to the access point (AP) to boost throughput. In the non-relay setting, when two nodes A and B transmit to the AP simultaneously, the AP aims to obtain both packet A and packet B rather than their network-coded packet. An interesting question is whether network coding, specifically PNC which extracts packet (A XOR B), can still be useful in such a setting. We provide an affirmative answer to this question with a novel two-layer decoding approach amenable to real-time implementation. Our USRP prototype indicates that NCMA can boost throughput by 100% in the medium-high SNR regime (>=10dB). We believe further throughput enhancement is possible by allowing more than two users to transmit together.
We study a problem of scheduling real-time traffic with hard delay constraints in an unreliable wireless channel. Packets arrive at a constant rate to the network and have to be delivered within a fixed number of slots in a fading wireless channel. For an infrastructure mode of traffic with a centralized scheduler, we are interested in the long time average throughput achievable for the real time traffic. In [1], the authors have stud- ied the feasible throughput vectors by identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions using work load characterization. In our work, we provide a characterization of the feasible throughput vectors using the notion of the rate region. We then discuss an extension to the network model studied in [1] by allowing multiple access during contention and propose an enhancement to the rate region of the wireless network. We characterize the feasible throughput vectors with the multiple access technique and study throughput optimal and utility maximizing strategies for the network scenario. Using simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy and discuss its advantages.
Platooning strategy is an important part of autonomous driving technology. Due to the limited resource of autonomous vehicles in platoons, mobile edge computing (MEC) is usually used to assist vehicles in platoons to obtain useful information, increasing its safety. Specifically, vehicles usually adopt the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism to transmit large amount of data to the base station (BS) through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, where the useful information can be extracted by the edge server connected to the BS and then sent back to the vehicles to make correct decisions in time. However, vehicles may be moving on different lanes with different velocities, which incurs the unfair access due to the characteristics of platoons, i.e., vehicles on different lanes transmit different amount of data to the BS when they pass through the coverage of the BS, which also results in the different amount of useful information received by various vehicles. Moreover, age of information (AoI) is an important performance metric to measure the freshness of the data. Large average age of data implies not receiving the useful information in time. It is necessary to design an access scheme to jointly optimize the fairness and data freshness. In this paper, we formulate a joint optimization problem in the MEC-assisted V2I networks and present a multi-objective optimization scheme to solve the problem through adjusting the minimum contention window under the IEEE 802.11 DCF mode according to the velocities of vehicles. The effectiveness of the scheme has been demonstrated by simulation.
Despite numerous advantages, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique can bring additional interference for the neighboring ultra-dense networks if the power consumption of the system is not properly optimized. While targeting on the green communication concept, in this paper, we propose an energy-efficient downlink resource allocation scheme for a NOMA-equipped cellular network. The objective of this work is to allocate subchannels and power of the base station among the users so that the overall energy efficiency is maximized. Since this problem is NP-hard, we attempt to find an elegant solution with reasonable complexity that provides good performance for some realistic applications. To this end, we decompose the problem into a subchannel allocation subproblem followed by a power loading subproblem that allocates power to each users data stream on each of its allocated subchannels. We first employ a many-to-many matching model under the assumption of uniform power loading in order to obtain the solution of the first subproblem with reasonable performance. Once the the subchannel-user mapping information is known from the first solution, we propose a geometric programming (GP)-based power loading scheme upon approximating the energy efficiency of the system by a ratio of two posynomials. The techniques adopted for these subproblems better exploit the available multi-user diversity compared to the techniques used in an earlier work. Having observed the computational overhead of the GP-based power loading scheme, we also propose a suboptimal computationally-efficient algorithm for the power loading subproblem with a polynomial time complexity that provides reasonably good performance. Extensive simulation has been conducted to verify that our proposed solution schemes always outperform the existing work while consuming much less power at the base station.
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in designing and realizing energy efficient wireless indoor access networks, namely, a hybrid system enabled by traditional RF access, such as WiFi, as well as the emerging visible light communication (VLC). VLC facilitates the great advantage of being able to jointly perform illumination and communications, and little extra power beyond illumination is required to empower communications, thus rendering wireless access with almost zero power consumption. On the other hand, when illumination is not required from the light source, the energy consumed by VLC could be more than that consumed by the RF. By capitalizing on the above properties, the proposed hybrid RF-VLC system is more energy efficient and more adaptive to the illumination conditions than the individual VLC or RF systems. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed system, we first formulate the problem of minimizing the power consumption of the hybrid RF-VLC system while satisfying the users requests and maintaining acceptable level of illumination, which is NP-complete. Therefore, we divide the problem into two subproblems. In the first subproblems, we determine the set of VLC access points (AP) that needs to be turned on to satisfy the illumination requirements. Given this set, we turn our attention to satisfying the users requests for real-time communications, and we propose a randomized online algorithm that, against an oblivious adversary, achieves a competitive ratio of $log(N)log(M)$ with probability of success $1 - frac{1}{N}$, where $N$ is the number of users and $M$ is the number of VLC and RF APs. We also show that the best online algorithm to solve this problem can achieve a competitive ratio of $log(M)$. Simulation results further demonstrate the advantages of the hybrid system.