Name: Research Topic: Supervisor: Co-Supervisor: Research Establishment:

Yi-Sheng Liu (liuy1@nu.ac.za) Medium Access Control in Wireless Networks Professor F. Takawira (ftakaw@nu.ac.za) Dr H. Xu (xuh@nu.ac.za) Centre for Radio Access Technologies-University of Natal

PhD Proposal
1. Introduction
The latest trend in modern communications is the desire for mobility; this can be seen from the tremendous increase in mobile phone subscribers in recent years [ITU, 2001]. A further trend being noticed is that the information being conveyed over the network, whether it is wired or wireless, is now digital.

These and the multimedia traffic in wireless networks carry a large number of different data types, each with its own QoS requirements. QoS guarantees are normally defined as a measure of the satisfaction experienced by a user using the service. In a wireless communication system, QoS is usually expressed in terms of delay and throughput requirements, and can normally be implemented at various layers of the OSI modelled networks. There are generally two different levels of QoS. In reference, [Chakravorty, 2000] these were termed as Network Level QoS and Host Level QoS. Due to the steadily increasing end -computing capacity over the last couple of years, the contribution and influence which Host Level QoS had on QoS has been practically minimized, therefore the research is mainly emphasized on Network Level QoS. However, although the QoS efforts have focused on network layer queuing and routing techniques, such techniques are not sufficient in providing end-to-end QoS in an unreliable medium such as the wireless domain. So, for wireless networks, QoS features also has to be provided at the data-link layer.

In wireless networks, the effective utilizations are considered as the most important design factors due to the sharing nature of the available medium (in frequency or time) and limitation of bandwidth capacity. The medium access control (MAC) protocol is therefore a critical part of the network stack which determines to a large extent the correct and efficient operation of the wireless network. This research focuses on the design and analysis of MAC protocols that incorporate QoS guarantees.

2. Wireless MAC Protocols

2.1 Survey of Wireless MAC Protocols MAC protocols implemented for various types of wireless networks can be grouped into following categories: Carrier sense multiple access (CSMA). An example of a network which implements this type of MAC is the 802.11 (PCF) network. Time division multiple access (TDMA). Satellite, cellular transmission, IEEE 802.11 (DCF) and HiperLAN centralized networks generally use this type of MAC scheme. Code division multiple access (CDMA). It is commonly used in wireless ATM (WATM) networks. Token passing. Several papers have proposed implementing a token passing strategy in Ad Hoc and Bluetooth wireless networks.

Among the existing MAC protocols, the IEEE 802.11 in PCF (Point Coordination Function) mode, and the HiperLAN achieve data transmission by having a central station poll the slave stations. Most academic research has focused on this centralized approach. The centralized approach is suitable for networks where only the last hop is wireless.

The Token Passing protocol to be considered in this research is a distributed medium access control protocol. Its advantages are robustness against single node failure, and support for flexible topologies, in which nodes can be partially connected and not all nodes need to have a connection with a master. Current wireless distributed MAC

protocols such as the IEEE 802.11 DCF (Distributed Coordination Function mode) and the ETSI HIPERLAN do not provide QoS guarantees that are required by some applications. In particular, the medium is not shared fairly among stations and mediumaccess time can be arbitrarily long.

2.2 Types of QoS Features Incorporated In MAC Protocols QoS has been perceived to be more or less governed by conventional parameters like bandwidth, fairness, packet loss/error tolerance, and delay. There exist several papers that attempted to incorporate QoS features into various categories of wireless networks. [Conti, 2003] proposed a MAC scheme that incorporated packet error probability (PEP) QoS guarantee into IEEE 802.11 WLAN networks. For WATM networks, numerous papers like [Passas, 1997], and [Huang 2003] have implemented end-to-end delay and fairness QoS guarantees in their MAC schemes. [Choi, 1997] proposed delay and packet loss tolerance QoS in centralized TDMA type MAC schemes. For distributed networks, [Shiann, 2001] amended bandwidth allocation QoS features in Ad Hoc distributed networks, however, virtually no papers ha ve proposed any augmentation of QoS guarantees in the token passing based wireless networks.

3. PhD Proposal
There exists a large amount of research on MAC protocols for wireless networks; however, many fields of interest have not been explored, especially in the area of hybrid MAC protocols. The PhD research will be following the work that was conducted for the MScEng, but focuss more on modelling the hybrid MAC protocol analytically.

The PhD research will investigate the following aspects of wireless networks: Design and derivation of QoS aware token-based MAC protocol for distributed wireless networks Performance analysis on the proposed MAC scheme Investigation of the effect of soft capacity on the performance of MAC protocols

Investigate the effect of non-Markovian arrival traffic patterns on the performance of the wireless MAC protocols

There are several newly published papers that proposed the concept of implementing token passing strategies in wireless networks [Lee, 2001], [Malpani, 2001], [Spyropoulos, 2002], [Willig, 2002], [Willig, 2003]. However, all the papers implemented the single token strategy, and no QoS features were incorporated into the network. It seems that virtually no work has been published on a multiple token MAC scheme, which incorporates QoS. The proposed approach therefore makes a significant contribution possible.

There exist very few papers that attempt to analytically model MAC protocols. Especially for the token-based MAC schemes, no papers have published any derivation for the mathematical expressions of delay and throughput of the network. This leads to a completely novel research approach. Several papers that attempted to model the MAC protocol are [Hwang, 2001], [Kim, 2002], [Maulik, 2003], however, the network they studied/analyzed is a very common ATM structured network. An interesting idea is to think of the token-based network as a multiple server network with multiple queues. One can also take the wireless issue into consideration such as the scenario when a token is lost; this can be solved by assuming that the server (token) takes randomly assigned timed vacations. These approaches are basic and adjustable and there exists great potential for improvement, especially in the area of wireless networks.

Once the analytical queuing model is formed, one can perform the throughput and queuing delay analyses, since they represent the measure of the effectiveness of the MAC scheme. It is commonly known that conducting a transient analysis of the performance measures for token-based network is a difficult task. Analyses of the queuing delay of relatively basic token MAC in the steady state are available, like [Adan, 1991], [Kim, 2002], but no papers have appeared on the more complicated transient analyses.

CDMA technology makes use of a spread spectrum known as direct sequence spreadspectrum (DS -SS) [Pursley, 1987]. In spread-spectrum communication, a transmitter spreads a transmission in a wide frequency spectrum by using a spreading code, which is independent of the data packet being sent. A receiver uses the same code to de-spread the received signal and retrieve the data. The codes themselves are unique to each CDMA channel and orthogonal to one another. The other users signals are not de-spread, since their codes do not match, and therefore only appear as noise, which can be represented as self- interference generated by the system.

The signal-to- interference ratio of CDMA is determined by the ratio of the desired signal power to the total interference power from all the other users. The capacity of CDMA is therefore only limited by the amount of interference that can be tolerated from other users. This is the main reason the capacity of CDMA is said to be interference limited, which creates an advantage over TDMA/FDMA, as FDMA and TDMA capacities are primarily bandwidth limited. No work has been done on investigating the possibility of forming a hybrid MAC scheme that combines the advantages of channel capacity and flexibility from CDMA and token passing techniques. It would make a novel contribution towards MAC research.

When conducting the analysis on general queuing networks, most papers assume the arrival pattern of the incoming traffic to be a Markovian process. The most common packet arrival process used is the Poisson process. In a real world environment, the data traffic does not follow the arrival pattern of a Poisson distribution, so investigating the effect of applying non-Markovian arrival patterns to the data traffic would provide a significant contribution by realistically modelling the queuing behaviour in the analytical model.

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