Continuing advances in wireless communications and MEMS (Micro-Electro Mechan- ical Systems) technologies have fostered the construction of a wide variety of sensor and ad hoc networks. These networks have broad applications spanning wide ar- eas, such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure maintenance, traffic manage- ment, energy management, disaster mitigation, personal medical monitoring, smart building, as well as military and defence. While these applications require high per- formance from the network, they suffer from resource constraints (such as limited battery power, processing capability, buffer space, etc.) that do not appear in tra- ditional wired networks. The inherent infrastructure-less characteristic of the sensor and ad hoc networks creates significant challenges. This dissertation addresses these challenges with two protocol designs. The main contributions of this dissertation are the design and evaluation of CS- MAC (stands for CDMA Sensor MAC), a novel multi-channel media access control (MAC) protocol for direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) wire- less sensor networks. Our protocol design uses combination of DS-CDMA and fre- quency division to reduce the channel interference and consequently improves system capacity and network throughput. We provide theoretical characterisation of the mean multiple access interference (MAI) at a given node in relation to the number of frequency channels. We show that by using only a small number of frequency chan- nels, the mean MAI can be reduced significantly. Through discrete event simulation (using UC Berkerly NS-2 simulator), we provide comparison of our proposed system to a pure DS-CDMA system as well as a contention based system. Simulation results reveal that our proposed system can achieve significant improvement in system efi ciency (measured in packet/second/channel) of a contention based system. When the same number of packets are transmitted in the network, our system consumes much less communication energy compared to the contention based system. A distributed channel allocation protocol is also proposed for the network forma- tion phase. We prove that our algorithm converges with correct channel assignments. Simulation results reveal that a much smaller number of channels is required than theoretical value when nodes are uniformly randomly deployed. The second contribution of this dissertation involves the design and evaluation of two location-aware select optimal neighbour (SON) algorithms for CSMA/CA based MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. Both algorithms concentrate on the improvement of energy eficiency of the whole network through the optimisation of the number of neighbours of each node. Our algorithms not only consider radio electronic energy consumption (e.g., coding, decoding) and radio transmission energy consumption (e.g., power amplifier), but also the electronic energy consumption at those irrelevant receivers (those who are not addressed by the transmission) that are located within the transmission range. Through simulations, we show that our algorithms can achieve signi??cant energy savings compared to the standard IEEE 802.11.

The market for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) has experienced tremendous growth over the last few years and this trend is expected to continue in the future. This growth is due to the fact that wireless LANs provide several benefits including mobility, efficiency, and accuracy. In addition, the cost of installation for wireless LANs is several orders of magnitude lower than with traditional wired LANs due to reduced cabling costs. The two major components of a WLAN are Access Points (APs) and Radio Cards (RCs). Efforts have been made in the past to assess the performance of different APs and RCs from different vendors. However, these evaluations have been restricted to tests of interoperability and roaming. Tests to assess performance with respect to range, throughput, and power consumption are less common. Moreover, these tests are usually performed using homogeneous test beds (i.e., hardware components belong to the same vendor). The objective of this research was to assess how commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) WLAN systems perform with respect to interoperability, roaming ability, power consumption, throughput, and range. In order to accomplish this, a test procedure composed of five experiments was developed. The evaluation was performed not only on homogeneous systems but also on systems constructed with hardware components from different vendors (i.e., heterogeneous). The results of the performance tests indicated that the different AP, RC, and their combinations, significantly affect the performance of the WLAN systems with respect to range, throughput, and power consumption. No significant differences were observed in the WLAN systems with respect to interoperability or roaming. The results of this research will help decision makers in understanding the key parameters that have to be considered when selecting WLAN equipment. In practice, however, it would be difficult for decision makers to determine which vendor of WLAN equipment has the best solution without actual testing. / Graduation date: 2003

The increased use of mobile wireless devices that we have recently been witnessing, such as smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and WiFi enabled devices in general, is driving an unprecedented increase in the amount of data traffic. This fast market adoption of the wireless technology along with the tremendous success of multimedia applications brought about higher capacity, connectivity, and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that can no longer be met with traditional networking paradigms. As a result, heterogeneous wireless networks have recently emerged as a potential solution for meeting such new requirements. Hybrid wireless mesh networks and femtocell/macrocell networks are examples of these newly emerging heterogeneous networks. While mesh networks are viewed as the backbone/core network, femtocell and cellular networks are viewed as the access networks linking end-users with the backbone networks. In this dissertation, we address the problem of resource allocation in heterogeneous networks. We investigate both types of networks/architectures: next-generation wireless backbone networks or simply wireless mesh networks (WMNs) and next-generation wireless access networks or simply femtocell (FC) networks. WMNs were first introduced to foster the availability of Internet services anywhere and at anytime. However, capacity limitation has been a fundamental challenge to WMNs, mainly due to the interference arising from the wireless nature of the environment as well as to the scarcity of the radio/channel resources. To overcome this problem, we propose in this dissertation an efficient scheduling scheme that reduces interference among active links via wise time and frequency assignments to the wireless mesh routers. The developed scheme is traffic aware in that it maximizes the capacity of wireless links but while accounting for their traffic loads, thus meeting the end-to-end bandwidth requirements as much as possible. In the second part of this thesis, we focus on developing power allocation techniques for FC networks. FCs have recently emerged as a key networking solution that has great potential for improving the capacity and coverage of traditional macrocell (MC) networks through high-speed indoor coverage. Their deployment, however, has given rise to new interference challenges which are mainly due to the FCs' autonomous nature and to the unreliability of the wireless medium. Driven by this fact, in the second part of this thesis, we first design a fully-distributed estimation-based power allocation scheme that aims at fairly maximizing the capacity of FC networks. Second, we propose a novel distributed stochastic power control scheme that aims at maintaining the users' minimum= required QoS. Finally, we provide cross-layer performance analysis of two-tier FC networks, in which we characterize the uplink interference and study its impact on the data-link layer QoS performance in FC networks. / Graduation date: 2013

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-78). Also available in electronic version.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-111).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-116). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2000. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-113).

Thesis (ME--Engineering) -- AUT University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (ix, 108 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. + 1 CD-ROM (4 3/4 in.)) in City Campus Theses Collection (T 004.62 LIU)