Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Balasubramaniam Natarajan / Triggered by the popularity of smart devices, wireless traffic volume and device connectivity have been growing exponentially during recent years. The next generation of wireless networks, i.e., 5G, is a promising solution to satisfy the increasing data demand through combination of key enabling technologies such as deployment of a high density of access points (APs), referred to as ultra-densification, and utilization of a large amount of bandwidth in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands. However, due to unfavorable propagation characteristics, this portion of spectrum has been under-utilized. As a solution, large antenna arrays that coherently direct the beams will help overcome the hostile characteristics of mmWave signals. Building networks of directional antennas has given rise to many challenges in wireless communication design. One of the main challenges is how to incorporate 5G technology into current networks and design uniform structures that bring about higher network performance and quality of service. In addition, the other factor that can be severely impacted is interference behavior. This is basically due to the fact that, narrow beams are highly vulnerable to obstacles in the environment. Motivated by these factors, the present dissertation addresses some key challenges associated with the utilization of mmWave signals. As a first step towards this objective, we first propose a framework of how 5G mmWave access points can be integrated into the current wireless structures and offer higher data rates. The related resource sharing problem has been also proposed and solved, within such a framework. Secondly, to better understand and quantify the interference behavior, we propose interference models for mmWave networks with directional beams for both large scale and finite-sized network dimension. The interference model is based on our proposed blockage model which captures the average number of obstacles that cause a complete link blockage, given a specific signal beamwidth. The main insight from our analysis shows that considering the effect of blockages leads to a different interference profile. Furthermore, we investigate how to model interference considering not only physical layer specifications but also upper layers constraints. In fact, upper network layers, such as medium access control (MAC) protocol controls the number of terminals transmitting simultaneously and how resources are shared among them, which in turn impacts the interference power level. An interesting result from this analysis is that, from the receiving terminal standpoint, even in mmWave networks with directional signals and high attenuation effects, we still need to maintain some sort of sensing where all terminals are not allowed to transmit their packets, simultaneously. The level of such sensing depends on the terminal density. Lastly, we provide a framework to detect the network regime and its relation to various key deployment parameters, leveraging the proposed interference and blockage models. Such regime detection is important from a network management and design perspective. Based on our finding, mmWave networks can exhibit either an interference-limited regime or a noise-limited regime, depending on various factors such as access point density, blockage density, signal beamwidth, etc.

Benefiting from the constant and significant advancement of wireless communication technologies and networking protocols, Wireless Ad hoc NETwork (WANET) has played a more and more important role in modern communication networks without relying much on existing infrastructures. The past decades have seen numerous applications adopting ad hoc networks for service provisioning. For example, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be widely deployed for environment monitoring and object tracking by utilizing low-cost, low-power and multi-function sensor nodes. To realize such applications, the design and evaluation of communication protocols are of significant importance. Meanwhile, the network performance analysis based on mathematical models is also in great need of development and improvement. This dissertation investigates the above topics from three important and fundamental aspects, including data collection protocol design, protocol modeling and analysis, and physical interference modeling and analysis. The contributions of this dissertation are four-fold. First, this dissertation investigates the synchronization issue in the duty-cycled, pipelined-scheduling data collection of a WSN, based on which a pipelined data collection protocol, called PDC, is proposed. PDC takes into account both the pipelined data collection and the underlying schedule synchronization over duty-cycled radios practically and comprehensively. It integrates all its components in a natural and seamless way to simplify the protocol implementation and to achieve a high energy efficiency and low packet delivery latency. Based on PDC, an Adaptive Data Collection (ADC) protocol is further proposed to achieve dynamic duty-cycling and free addressing, which can improve network heterogeneity, load adaptivity, and energy efficiency. Both PDC and ADC have been implemented in a pioneer open-source operating system for the Internet of Things, and evaluated through a testbed built based on two hardware platforms, as well as through emulations. Second, Linear Sensor Network (LSN) has attracted increasing attention due to the vast requirements on the monitoring and surveillance of a structure or area with a linear topology. Being aware that, for LSN, there is few work on the network modeling and analysis based on a duty-cycled MAC protocol, this dissertation proposes a framework for modeling and analyzing a class of duty-cycled, multi-hop data collection protocols for LSNs. With the model, the dissertation thoroughly investigates the PDC performance in an LSN, considering both saturated and unsaturated scenarios, with and without retransmission. Extensive OPNET simulations have been carried out to validate the accuracy of the model. Third, in the design and modeling of PDC above, the transmission and interference ranges are defined for successful communications between a pair of nodes. It does not consider the cumulative interference from the transmitters which are out of the contention range of a receiver. Since most performance metrics in wireless networks, such as outage probability, link capacity, etc., are nonlinear functions of the distances among communicating, relaying, and interfering nodes, a physical interference model based on distance is definitely needed in quantifying these metrics. Such quantifications eventually involve the Nodal Distance Distribution (NDD) intrinsically depending on network coverage and nodal spatial distribution. By extending a tool in integral geometry and using decomposition and recursion, this dissertation proposes a systematic and algorithmic approach to obtaining the NDD between two nodes which are uniformly distributed at random in an arbitrarily-shaped network. Fourth, with the proposed approach to NDDs, the dissertation presents a physical interference model framework to analyze the cumulative interference and link outage probability for an LSN running the PDC protocol. The framework is further applied to analyze 2D networks, i.e., ad hoc Device-to-Device (D2D) communications underlaying cellular networks, where the cumulative interference and link outage probabilities for both cellular and D2D communications are thoroughly investigated. / Graduate / 0984 / 0544 / tong1987fei@163.com