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Driven by the ambition for ubiquitous networking, wireless networks had gained substantial technical advances in recent years. Using radio signals in air as data links, wireless networks can get rid of the tangling of wired cables. However, due to the inherent limitations of wireless channels and legacy protocol design, users of wireless networks today still suffer from the problems on low bandwidth and high error rates. The seven-layer Open System Interconnection (OSI) model was originally designed with wired network environments in mind. Following the seven-layer OSI model, each layer is responsible for handling specific tasks without communicating with each other. Due to the relative stability of wired channels, the strictly-layered approach works well in wired network environments. However, its adequacy is a controversy in wireless environments, since wireless networks have completely different characteristics from its wired counterparts. In wireless environments, channel conditions are highly time-varying and are affected by many factors. External interference or signal degradation may lead to severe packet loss. Even signal-to-noise ratios are fine, transmissions may still fail due to collisions when contention-based MAC protocols are adopted. Conventional protocols developed with wired network environments in mind cannot appropriately response to the characteristics of wireless channels and may make wrong reactions. For these reasons, a flexible framework to capture the rapid change conditions of wireless channels and respond to them immediately is necessary. In this dissertation, we design a cross-layer framework with the consideration of wireless network characteristics. By the coordination between the involved layers, the cross-layer framework can adapt to wireless channel conditions and significantly improve QoS in wireless networks. In order to reduce collision probabilities in wireless networks, we propose a novel protocol named Wait-and-Transmit, which effectively alleviates contentions in wireless networks. By reducing collision probabilities of wireless networks, transmission delays can be shortened and throughputs can be significantly improved. Aiming at the transmission paths containing at least one wireless link, a flexible and efficient cross-layer transmission scheme is also present in this dissertation, which separates the rapid change conditions such as collision probabilities from the relatively stable conditions and well responds to these changes. The proposed approaches significantly improve the performance of wireless networks. We believe that these approaches can contribute to the development of wireless networking.

Due to the fast growing bandwidth of Internet users, the P2P video streaming on the Internet becomes one of impaortant solutions to release the traffic load. However, the current studies fall short of addressing the video delay issue on live P2P streaming. In this research, we proposed a topology construction method: Smart-Fit, towards minimizing the transmission delay between users and video server. The concept is based on minimizing the hop counts between server and users, in further to reduce the delay. With the bandwidth variety of Internet users, the proppsed method builds a predicted ideal template. Then the users¡¦ joining and leaving behaviors and the system¡¦s topology are constructed according to the template. Simulation results show the proposed method successfully reduces the hop count and the transmission delay between users and server. Moreover, due to the reduction of hop count, the packet loss rate is also reduced.

Dans les réseaux d'accès sans fil, l'un des défis les plus récents est la réduction de la consommation d'énergie du réseau, tout en préservant la qualité de service perçue par les utilisateurs finaux. Cette thèse propose des solutions à ce problème difficile considérant deux objectifs, l'économie d'énergie et la minimisation du délai de transmission. Comme ces objectifs sont contradictoires, un compromis devient inévitable. Par conséquent, nous formulons un problème d’optimisation multi-objectif dont le but est la minimisation conjointe de la puissance consommée et du délai de transmission dans les réseaux sans-fil. La minimisation de la puissance est réalisée en ajustant le mode de fonctionnement des stations de base (BS) du réseau d’un niveau élevé de puissance d’émission vers un niveau d'émission plus faible ou même en mode veille. La minimisation du délai de transmission est réalisée par le meilleur rattachement des utilisateurs avec les BS du réseau. Nous couvrons deux réseaux sans-fil différents en raison de leur pertinence : les réseaux locaux sans-fil (IEEE 802.11 WLAN) et les réseaux cellulaires dotés de la technologie LTE. / In wireless access networks, one of the most recent challenges is reducing the power consumption of the network, while preserving the quality of service perceived by the end users. The present thesis provides solutions to this challenging problem considering two objectives, namely, saving power and minimizing the transmission delay. Since these objectives are conflicting, a tradeoff becomes inevitable. Therefore, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem with aims of minimizing the network power consumption and transmission delay. Power saving is achieved by adjusting the operation mode of the network Base Stations (BSs) from high transmit power levels to low transmit levels or even sleep mode. Minimizing the transmission delay is achieved by selecting the best user association with the network BSs. We cover two different wireless networks, namely IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks and LTE cellular networks.