Channel assignment in wireless mesh network (WMN) aims at improving the network throughput by utilizing multiple orthogonal frequency channels to minimize the interference. Interference can be categorized as coordinated and non-coordinated, depending upon the relative location of the interfering links. Compared to coordinated interference, non-coordinated interference has a severe adverse impact on throughput. This thesis is based on the hypothesis that the network throughput can be improved significantly, if channel assignment minimizes non-coordinated interference with priority. We propose a static and centralized channel assignment scheme CCAS to show the effectiveness of the hypothesis. The cluster-based approach of CCAS minimizes non-coordinated interference with reduced complexity. CCAS improves the network throughput by upto 80%, compared to the existing schemes. We propose topology control scheme MATS that constructs low interference multipath network topology using a subset of links from physical topology. We report an additional improvement of upto 10% in the network throughput, when CCAS assigns channels to the links selected by MATS. In the final part of the thesis, we formulate generalized channel assignment as an optimization problem, accounting for real network traffic. The objective of the problem is to select the channels for links such that maximum incident traffic can be transmitted over the links, while ensuring a fair distribution of throughput amongst links and elimination of non-coordinated interference. For a given network and incident traffic, the solution to this problem generates the channel assignment resulting in optimal network throughput. We propose dynamic and distributed scheme LYCAS as an approximate solution to the problem. LYCAS employs MATS to construct network topology and cluster-based approach of CCAS to minimize non-coordinated interference. In addition, it periodically updates the assignment of channels to adapt to the changing traffic load. LYCAS achieves upto 68% of the optimal network throughput and upto 72% of optimal aggregate end-to-end throughput of multi-hop flows. It outperforms the existing schemes by a factor of 2.

Wireless mesh networks has rapid development over the last few years. However, due to properties such as distributed infrastructure and interference, which strongly affect the performance of wireless mesh networks, developing technology has to face the challenge of architecture and protocol design issues. Traditional layered protocols do not function efficiently in multi-hop wireless environments. To get deeper understanding on interaction of the layered protocols and optimize the performance of wireless mesh network, more recent researches are focusing on cross-layer measurement schemes and cross-layer protocol design. The goal of this project is to implement a distributed monitoring mechanism for IEEE802.11 based wireless mesh networks. This module is event-based and has modular structure that makes it flexible to be extended. This project results a novel Cross-Layer Monitoring Module, CLMM, which is a prototype that monitors each layer of the nodes locally and dynamically, calculates the average values of the metrics, compares these values with thresholds and handles the cross-layer messages of each node. The CLMM also has a routing module structure that can be extended to distribute the metrics to its neighbors.

Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic in a multi-hop wireless mesh network (WMN) suffers from a large overhead due to mac/IP/UDP/RTP headers and time collisions. A consequence of the large overhead is that only a small number of concurrent VoIP calls can be supported in a WMN[17]. Hop-to-hop packet aggregation can reduce network overhead and increase the capacity. Packet aggregation is a concept which combines several small packets, destined to a common next-hop destination, to one large packet. The goal of this thesis was to implement packet aggregation on a Linux distribution and to increase the number of concurrent VoIP calls. We use as testbed a two-hop WMN with a fixed data rate of 2Mbit/s. Traffic was generated between nodes using MGEN[20] to simulate VoIP behavior. The results from the tests show that the number of supported concurrent flows in the testbed is increased by 135% compared to unaggregated traffic.

Internet rate control protocols, such as TCP, encounter severe performance problems in wireless mesh networks. Because wireless networks use shared communication channels, contention and interference can significantly degrade flow throughput and fairness. Existing research takes either an engineering-based or optimization-based approach to solve the performance problems. The engineering-based approach usually solves a specific observed problem, but does not necessarily optimize the overall performance. The optimization-based approach mathematically models the network to find the optimal resource allocation among competing flows. The model can lead to a distributed rate control algorithm with performance guarantees, but relatively little work has been done to verify that the algorithm leads to good performance in real networks. This dissertation develops a more accurate network optimization model, implements the derived distributed rate control algorithm in a mesh testbed, and discusses observations in the extensive experiments. We first synthesize models used for optimizing fair rate control for wireless mesh networks, and discuss their tradeoffs. We then propose a partial interference model which uses more accurate objective functions and constraints as compared to the binary interference model. Numerical results show that the partial interference model outperforms the binary interference model in all scenarios tested, and the results also suggest that partial interference should be modeled separately from contention. Our experimental results confirm the prevalence of partial interference in our mesh testbed, and show that the partial interference model results in significantly improved performance in a typical interference topology. We also observe a significant deviation between theory and practice, whereby, the assumption of a linear relationship between interfering links breaks in our experiments. We discuss several directions to further investigate this issue.

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The rapid advances in networking technology have enabled large-scale deployments of online video streaming services in today's Internet. In particular, wireless Internet access technology has been one of the most transforming and empowering technologies in recent years. We have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of mobile users who access online video services through wireless access networks, such as wireless mesh networks and 3G cellular networks. Unlike in wired environment, using a dedicated stream for each video service request is very expensive for wireless networks. This simple strategy also has limited scalability when popular content is demanded by a large number of users. It is desirable to have a robust wireless access environment that can sustain a sudden spurt of interest for certain videos due to, say a current event. Moreover, due to the mobility of the video users, smooth streaming performance during the handoff is a key requirement to the robustness of the wireless access networks for mobile video users. In this dissertation, the author focuses on the robustness of the wireless mesh access (WMA) environment for mobile video users. Novel video sharing techniques are proposed to reduce the burden of video streaming in different WMA environments. The author proposes a cross-layer framework for scalable Video-on-Demand (VOD) service in multi-hop WiMax mesh networks. The author also studies the optimization problems for video multicast in a general wireless mesh networks. The WMA environment is modeled as a connected graph with a video source in one of the nodes and the video requests randomly generated from other nodes in the graph. The optimal video multicast problem in such environment is formulated as two sub-problems. The proposed solutions of the sub-problems are justified using simulation and numerical study. In the case of online video streaming, online video server does not cooperate with the access networks. In this case, the centralized data sharing technique fails since they assume the cooperation between the video server and the network. To tackle this problem, a novel distributed video sharing technique called Dynamic Stream Merging (DSM) is proposed. DSM improves the robustness of the WMA environment without the cooperation from the online video server. It optimizes the per link sharing performance with small time complexity and message complexity. The performance of DSM has been studied using simulations in Network Simulator 2 (NS2) as well as real experiments in a wireless mesh testbed. The Mobile YouTube website (http://m.youtube.com) is used as the online video website in the experiment. Last but not the least; a cross-layer scheme is proposed to avoid the degradation on the video quality during the handoff in the WMA environment. Novel video quality related triggers and the routing metrics at the mesh routers are utilized in the handoff decision making process. A redirection scheme is also proposed to eliminate packet loss caused by the handoff.

This thesis studies multicasting high bandwidth media traffic in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Traditional multicast methods use a single multicast tree to reach all destinations, and adapt the multicast rate to the destination with the worst path quality. This approach does not fully utilize the network resources nor distinguish the quality of service (QoS) requirements of different users. It also penalizes the users having better path quality and requiring higher QoS. In multi-hop transmissions, the end-to-end transmission rate is limited by the link with the worst transmission conditions. This makes it difficult to multicast high-bandwidth media traffic with good quality. Using multiple description coding (MDC), the source traffic can be split into multiple sub-streams, referred to as descriptions, each of which requires a much lower bandwidth and can be transmitted along separate paths. In this thesis, we study routing and QoS provisioning jointly for multicasting multiple description (MD) encoded media traffic in WMNs. Routing for the multiple descriptions is jointly studied, while considering the channel quality of different links in the network and QoS at individual destinations. The work in this thesis is divided into two parts. The first part (Chapters 3 and 4) considers balanced descriptions, each of which contributes equally to the quality of the recovered media at a destination, and we study the problem of power efficient multicasting for the MD-encoded media traffic in WMNs. In Chapter 3, single-hop transmissions are considered. That is, the access points (APs) that store the source traffic communicate with the destination nodes directly. We study two problems jointly, description assignments and power allocations. The former is to assign a description for each AP to transmit, and the latter is to allocate the transmission power for the APs. Different power efficiency objectives are considered, subject to satisfying the QoS requirements of the destination nodes. For each objective, an optimization problem is formulated and heuristic solutions are proposed. Chapter 4 extends the work to multi-hop transmissions, where relay stations (RSs) are available to forward the traffic from the APs to the destinations. We consider two different routing structures based on whether an RS is allowed to forward more than one description. The objective is to minimize the total transmission power of the APs and the RSs in the network, subject to the QoS requirements of the destinations. An optimum problem is formulated and then translated to an integer and linear programming problem, and a centralized scheme with much lower complexity is proposed. Following that, a distributed scheme, referred to as minimum weight k-path scheme, is proposed, which builds one multicast tree for each description. By permitting only neighboring nodes to exchange related information, the scheme allows each node to find its best parent node based on the additional transmission power needed to establish the link. The second part (Chapter 5) of the thesis considers unbalanced descriptions. Routing for the multiple descriptions is jointly considered with application layer performance, so that the maximum distortion of recovered media at the destinations is minimized. An optimization problem is first formulated, and a centralized scheme with lower complexity is proposed. The centralized scheme first finds a set of candidate paths for each destination based on a predefined set of criteria, then it iteratively expands the multicast trees by only merging the paths that minimize the maximum distortion for all destinations. A distributed scheme is also proposed by modifying the minimum weight k-path scheme. In the modified scheme, each RS makes a local decision to join different multicast trees based on the expected distortion among its connected downstream nodes. The proposed multicasting schemes require much lower implementation complexity, compared to the optimum solutions. The centralized scheme is more suitable for small size networks, and achieves close-to-optimum performance for a wide range of parameter settings. The distributed scheme only requires neighboring nodes to exchange information, and can be implemented to networks with a relatively large number of APs, RSs, and destination nodes. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)