The cooperative relaying scheme is a promising technique for increasing the capacity and reliability of wireless communication. Even though extensive research has performed in information theoretical aspect, there are still many unresolved practical problems of cooperative relaying system. This dissertation analyzes the performance of cooperative decode-and-forward (DF) relaying systems in the presence of multiple interferers and improve network throughput for these systems. We propose and summarize various systems in the view of network topology, transmission structure, and slot allocation. We present closed-form expressions for the end-to-end outage probability, average symbol-error-probability, average packet-error-probability, and network throughput of the proposed systems. This dissertation shows that the robustness of the destination against interference is more important than robustness of the relay against interference from an interference management perspective, and increasing the number of branches yields better outage and error performance improvements against shadowing than increasing the number of hops. In cellular networks, the cooperative diversity systems can outperform the dual-Rx antenna system, but only when the relay is located in a relatively small portion of the total cell area with respect the the destination mobile terminal. The results also show that since the effective regions of the uplink and the downlink do not overlap, different relays should be utilized for cell sectorization in the uplink and the downlink. Finally, the proposed variable-slot selection DF scheme can reduce the system complexity and make the maximum throughput point in the low and moderate signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio region.

Wireless communication has seen a tremendous growth in the last decades. Continuing on this trend, wireless multi-hop networks  are nowadays used or planned for use in a multitude of contexts, spanning from Internet access at home to emergency situations. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides reliable and ordered delivery of a data and is used by major Internet applications such as web browsers, email clients and file transfer programs. TCP traffic is also the dominating traffic type on the Internet. However, TCP performs less than optimal in wireless multi-hop networks due to packet reordering, low link capacity, packet loss and variable delay. In this thesis, we develop novel proposals for enhancing the network and transport layer to improve TCP performance in wireless multi-hop networks. As initial studies, we experimentally evaluate the performance of different TCP variants, with and without mobile nodes. We further evaluate the impact of multi-path routing on TCP performance and propose packet aggregation combined with aggregation aware multi-path forwarding as a means to better utilize the available bandwidth. The last contribution is a novel extension to multi-path TCP to  enable single-homed hosts to fully utilize the network capacity. / <p>Opponent changed. Prof. C. Lindeman from the University of Leipzig was substituted by Prof. Zhang.</p>

The popularity of ubiquitous Internet services has spurred the fast growth of wireless communications by launching data hungry multimedia applications to mobile devices. Powered by spectrum agile cognitive radios, the newly emerged cognitive radio networks (CRN) are proposed to provision the efficient spectrum reuse to improve spectrum utilization. Unlicensed users in CRN, or secondary users (SUs), access the temporarily idle channels in a secondary and opportunistic fashion while preventing harmful interference to licensed primary users (PUs). To effectively detect and exploit the spectrum access opportunities released from a wide spectrum, the heterogeneous wireless channel characteristics and the underlying prioritized spectrum reuse features need to be considered in the protocol design and resource management schemes in CRN, which plays a critical role in unlicensed spectrum sharing among multiple users. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the challenges of utilizing heterogeneous wireless channels in CRN by its intrinsic dynamic and diverse natures, and build the efficient, scalable and, more importantly, practical dynamic spectrum access mechanisms to enable the cost-effective transmissions for unlicensed users. Note that the spectrum access opportunities exhibit the diversity in the time/frequency/space domain, secondary transmission schemes typically follow three design principles including 1) utilizing local free channels within short transmission range, 2) cooperative and opportunistic transmissions, and 3) effectively coordinating transmissions in varying bandwidth. The entire research work in this dissertation casts a systematic view to address these principles in the design of the routing protocols, medium access control (MAC) protocols and radio resource management schemes in CRN. Specifically, as spectrum access opportunities usually have small spatial footprints, SUs only communicate with the nearby nodes in a small area. Thus, multi-hop transmissions in CRN are considered in this dissertation to enable the connections between any unlicensed users in the network. CRN typically consist of intermittent links of varying bandwidth so that the decision of routing is closely related with the spectrum sensing and sharing operations in the lower layers. An efficient opportunistic cognitive routing (OCR) scheme is proposed in which the forwarding decision at each hop is made by jointly considering physical characteristics of spectrum bands and diverse activities of PUs in each single band. Such discussion on spectrum aware routing continues coupled with the sensing selection and contention among multiple relay candidates in a multi-channel multi-hop scenario. An SU selects the next hop relay and the working channel based upon location information and channel usage statistics with instant link quality feedbacks. By evaluating the performance of the routing protocol and the joint channel and route selection algorithm with extensive simulations, we determine the optimal channel and relay combination with reduced searching complexity and improved spectrum utilization. Besides, we investigate the medium access control (MAC) protocol design in support of multimedia applications in CRN. To satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of heterogeneous applications for SUs, such as voice, video, and data, channels are selected to probe for appropriate spectrum opportunities based on the characteristics and QoS demands of the traffic along with the statistics of channel usage patterns. We propose a QoS-aware MAC protocol for multi-channel single hop scenario where each single SU distributedly determines a set of channels for sensing and data transmission to satisfy QoS requirements. By analytical model and simulations, we determine the service differentiation parameters to provision multiple levels of QoS. We further extend our discussion of dynamic resource management to a more practical deployment case. We apply the experiences and skills learnt from cognitive radio study to cellular communications. In heterogeneous cellular networks, small cells are deployed in macrocells to enhance link quality, extend network coverage and offload traffic. As different cells focus on their own operation utilities, the optimization of the total system performance can be analogue to the game between PUs and SUs in CRN. However, there are unique challenges and operation features in such case. We first present challenging issues including interference management, network coordination, and interworking between cells in a tiered cellular infrastructure. We then propose an adaptive resource management framework to improve spectrum utilization and mitigate the co-channel interference between macrocells and small cells. A game-theory-based approach is introduced to handle power control issues under constrained control bandwidth and limited end user capability. The inter-cell interference is mitigated based upon orthogonal transmissions and strict protection for macrocell users. The research results in the dissertation can provide insightful lights on flexible network deployment and dynamic spectrum access for prioritized spectrum reuse in modern wireless systems. The protocols and algorithms developed in each topic, respectively, have shown practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize CRN.

For large multihop networks, the time synchronization (TS) error accumulates as the hop number increases with conventional methods, such as Timing-sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN), Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS), and Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP). In this paper, to reduce the number of hops to cover the large network and exploit the spatial averaging of TS error between clusters, a novel method combining Concurrent Cooperative Transmission (CCT) and Semi-Cooperative Spectrum Fusion (SCSF) is proposed. This novel method named Cooperative Analog and Digital (CANDI) Time Synchronization protocol consists of two phases: The digital stage and the analog stage. The digital stage uses CCT to broadcast TS packet containing the time information. Cooperating nodes transmit the digitally encoded message in orthogonal channels simultaneously, so the receiver combines the multiple packet to acheive significant SNR advantage. In the analog stage, the cooperating nodes simultaneously transmit their slightly different individual estimates of the propagation time by using frequency shift modulation. Nodes receiving this signal combat fading and reduce estimation error in one step through the averaging inherent in diversity combining. Simulation results for two-dimension (2-D) networks are given to evaluate the performance of CANDI, and CANDI is compared with TPSN.

We consider single-source single-sink (ss-ss) multi-hop relay networks, with slow-fading links and single-antenna half-duplex relay nodes. While two-hop cooperative relay networks have been studied in great detail in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), few results are available for more general networks. In this paper, we identify two families of networks that are multi-hop generalizations of the two-hop network: K-Parallel-Path (KPP) networks and layered networks. KPP networks can be viewed as the union of K node-disjoint parallel relaying paths, each of length greater than one. KPP networks are then generalized to KPP(I) networks, which permit interference between paths and to KPP(D) networks, which possess a direct link from source to sink. We characterize the DMT of these families of networks completely for K > 3. Layered networks are networks comprising of layers of relays with edges existing only between adjacent layers, with more than one relay in each layer. We prove that a linear DMT between the maximum diversity dmax and the maximum multiplexing gain of 1 is achievable for single-antenna fully-connected layered networks. This is shown to be equal to the optimal DMT if the number of relaying layers is less than 4. For multiple-antenna KPP and layered networks, we provide an achievable DMT, which is significantly better than known lower bounds for half duplex networks. For arbitrary multi-terminal wireless networks with multiple source-sink pairs, the maximum achievable diversity is shown to be equal to the min-cut between the corresponding source and the sink, irrespective of whether the network has half-duplex or full-duplex relays. For arbitrary ss-ss single-antenna directed acyclic networks with full-duplex relays, we prove that a linear tradeoff between maximum diversity and maximum multiplexing gain is achievable. Along the way, we derive the optimal DMT of a generalized parallel channel and derive lower bounds for the DMT of triangular channel matrices, which are useful in DMT computation of various protocols. All protocols in this paper are explicit and use only amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. We also construct codes with short block-lengths based on cyclic division algebras that achieve the optimal DMT for all the proposed schemes. Two key implications of the results in the paper are that the half-duplex constraint does not entail any rate loss for a large class of cooperative networks and that simple AF protocols are often sufficient to attain the optimal DMT.

The C2X Communication is of high interest to the automotive industry. Ongoing research on this topic mainly bases on the simulation of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. In order to estimate the necessary level of simulation details their impact on the results needs to be examined. This thesis focuses on different channel models as the freespace, shadowing, and Ricean model, along with varying parameters. For these simulations the network simulator ns-2 is extended to provide IEEE 802.11p compliance. However, the WAVE mode is not considered since it is still under development and not finally approved. Besides a more sophisticated packet error model than the existing implementation, as well as a link adaptation algorithm, is added. In this thesis several simulations examine specific details of wireless communication systems such as fairness of multiple access, interferences, throughput, and variability. Furthermore, the simulation points out some unexpected phenomena as starving nodes and saturation effects in multi hop networks. Those led to the conclusion that the IEEE 802.11 draft amendment does not solve known problems of the original IEEE 802.11 standard.

In Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), disseminating warning messages in a timely and efficient way through wireless short-range communications can save many lives and reduce traffic congestion. A geographical broadcast protocol provides data delivery to specified geographical areas, using multi-hop communications if needed. Among the main challenges for such protocols are forwarder selection and the reduction of the number of hops required to reach and cover the destination area.  In this thesis we propose an efficient geographical broadcast protocol called Preferred and Contention Based Forwarding (PCBF) and evaluate it through simulations. PCBF uses a combination of contention-based forwarding and selecting preferred forwarders also found in other protocols like Emergency Message Dissemination for Vehicular Environments (EMDV). Since the preferred forwarder is allowed to immediately forward the packet (evading contention among other potential forwarders), this approach reduces end-to-end delays. Notable extensions of PCBF compared to EMDV are the use of direct negative acknowledgements in case of unnecessary rebroadcasts and the use of forwarders outside the target region.  Our simulation results show that the PCBF protocol outperforms selected other protocols in terms of end-to-end delay, re-broadcast overhead and reliability in both sparse and dense networks.

The popularity of ubiquitous Internet services has spurred the fast growth of wireless communications by launching data hungry multimedia applications to mobile devices. Powered by spectrum agile cognitive radios, the newly emerged cognitive radio networks (CRN) are proposed to provision the efficient spectrum reuse to improve spectrum utilization. Unlicensed users in CRN, or secondary users (SUs), access the temporarily idle channels in a secondary and opportunistic fashion while preventing harmful interference to licensed primary users (PUs). To effectively detect and exploit the spectrum access opportunities released from a wide spectrum, the heterogeneous wireless channel characteristics and the underlying prioritized spectrum reuse features need to be considered in the protocol design and resource management schemes in CRN, which plays a critical role in unlicensed spectrum sharing among multiple users. The purpose of this dissertation is to address the challenges of utilizing heterogeneous wireless channels in CRN by its intrinsic dynamic and diverse natures, and build the efficient, scalable and, more importantly, practical dynamic spectrum access mechanisms to enable the cost-effective transmissions for unlicensed users. Note that the spectrum access opportunities exhibit the diversity in the time/frequency/space domain, secondary transmission schemes typically follow three design principles including 1) utilizing local free channels within short transmission range, 2) cooperative and opportunistic transmissions, and 3) effectively coordinating transmissions in varying bandwidth. The entire research work in this dissertation casts a systematic view to address these principles in the design of the routing protocols, medium access control (MAC) protocols and radio resource management schemes in CRN. Specifically, as spectrum access opportunities usually have small spatial footprints, SUs only communicate with the nearby nodes in a small area. Thus, multi-hop transmissions in CRN are considered in this dissertation to enable the connections between any unlicensed users in the network. CRN typically consist of intermittent links of varying bandwidth so that the decision of routing is closely related with the spectrum sensing and sharing operations in the lower layers. An efficient opportunistic cognitive routing (OCR) scheme is proposed in which the forwarding decision at each hop is made by jointly considering physical characteristics of spectrum bands and diverse activities of PUs in each single band. Such discussion on spectrum aware routing continues coupled with the sensing selection and contention among multiple relay candidates in a multi-channel multi-hop scenario. An SU selects the next hop relay and the working channel based upon location information and channel usage statistics with instant link quality feedbacks. By evaluating the performance of the routing protocol and the joint channel and route selection algorithm with extensive simulations, we determine the optimal channel and relay combination with reduced searching complexity and improved spectrum utilization. Besides, we investigate the medium access control (MAC) protocol design in support of multimedia applications in CRN. To satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of heterogeneous applications for SUs, such as voice, video, and data, channels are selected to probe for appropriate spectrum opportunities based on the characteristics and QoS demands of the traffic along with the statistics of channel usage patterns. We propose a QoS-aware MAC protocol for multi-channel single hop scenario where each single SU distributedly determines a set of channels for sensing and data transmission to satisfy QoS requirements. By analytical model and simulations, we determine the service differentiation parameters to provision multiple levels of QoS. We further extend our discussion of dynamic resource management to a more practical deployment case. We apply the experiences and skills learnt from cognitive radio study to cellular communications. In heterogeneous cellular networks, small cells are deployed in macrocells to enhance link quality, extend network coverage and offload traffic. As different cells focus on their own operation utilities, the optimization of the total system performance can be analogue to the game between PUs and SUs in CRN. However, there are unique challenges and operation features in such case. We first present challenging issues including interference management, network coordination, and interworking between cells in a tiered cellular infrastructure. We then propose an adaptive resource management framework to improve spectrum utilization and mitigate the co-channel interference between macrocells and small cells. A game-theory-based approach is introduced to handle power control issues under constrained control bandwidth and limited end user capability. The inter-cell interference is mitigated based upon orthogonal transmissions and strict protection for macrocell users. The research results in the dissertation can provide insightful lights on flexible network deployment and dynamic spectrum access for prioritized spectrum reuse in modern wireless systems. The protocols and algorithms developed in each topic, respectively, have shown practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize CRN.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is a low-power, low-rate MAC/PHY standard that meets most of the stringent requirements of single-hop wireless sensor networks. Sensor networks with nodal populations comprised of thousands of devices have been envisioned in conjunction with environmental, vehicular, and military applications, to mention a few. However, such large sensor network deployments necessitate multi-hop support as well as low power consumption. In light of the standard's extremely limited joint support of the two aforementioned attributes, this thesis presents two essential contributions. First, a framework is proposed to implement a new IEEE 802.15.4 operating mode, namely the synchronized peer-to-peer mode. This mode is designed to enable the standard's low-power features in peer-to-peer multi-hop-ready topologies. The second contribution is a distributed Guaranteed Time Slot (dGTS ) management scheme designed to function in the newly devised network mode. This protocol provides reliable contention-free access in peer-to-peer topologies in a completely distributed manner. Assuming optimal routing, our simulation experiments reveal perfect delivery ratios as long as the traffic load does not reach or surpass its saturation threshold. dGTS sustains at least twice the delivery ratio of contention access under sub-optimal dynamic routing. Moreover, the dGTS scheme exhibits minimum power consumption by eliminating the retransmissions attributed to contention, which in turn reduces the number of transmissions to a minimum. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2007-10-25 14:55:36.811

Les réseaux sans-fil tels que IEEE 802.11 (Wifi) connaissent aujourd'hui une popularité sans précédent, offrant des connexions réseau à domicile, en entreprise ou dans des lieux publics sous forme de "Hot spot". Nos études ont montré que les centres urbains sont fortement couvert par ce type de réseau (avec une couverture similaire aux réseaux 3G). Cependant, la technologie est limitée par la portée du signal qui provoque des pertes sur le canal. Nous proposons une nouvelle méthode de relayage opportuniste pour les réseaux basés sur le CSMA/CA permettant de faire coopérer des stations. En évitant l'inondation, et en réduisant au maximum la signalisation, nous proposons de légères modifications au standard IEEE 802.11 afin d'autoriser des stations intermédiaires à relayer les trames des autres stations. Les modifications apportées portent simplement sur le traitement des trames à destination d'autrui, et une gestion différente des acquittements : lorsqu'une destination ne reçoit pas un acquittement, toutes les stations ayant reçu la trame considèrent qu'une retransmission est nécessaire. Ces dernières entreront en compétition pour retransmettre la trame si leur probabilité d'effectuer une transmission réussie est plus forte que la source. Nous avons implémenté et testé notre proposition dans le simulateur réseau NS-2, et les résultats démontrent que la connectivité des stations lointaines est fortement améliorée.