An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile wireless devices that cooperate with each other to route packets amongst themselves. The main difficulty in designing routing algorithms for such a network is the large number of topology changes that the network undergoes due to device movement. Selective flooding is a routing technique that is more resilient to topology changes than traditional algorithms but is more bandwidth efficient than pure flooding. An on-demand selective flooding algorithm has been designed and tested on the ns-2 simulator. In scenarios involving a large number of topology changes, selective flooding outperforms other ad hoc network routing techniques. Unfortunately, selective flooding is much more bandwidth hungry and is unable to scale to handle reasonable traffic loads. Interestingly, the analysis of selective flooding reveals major problems with traditional ad hoc networking techniques. Many current algorithms demonstrate shortcomings when dealing with bursty traffic, and current wireless hardware cannot handle ad hoc networking traffic in an efficient manner. These issues need to be addressed before ad hoc networking technology can become feasible for widespread use.

Next generation wireless communication systems are expected to provide a variety of services including voice, data and video. The rapidly growing demand for these services needs high data rate wireless communication systems with reliability and high user capacity. Recently, it has been shown that reliability and achievable data rate of wireless communication systems increases dramatically by employing multiple transmit and receive antennas. Transmit diversity is a powerful technique for combating multipath fading in wireless communications. However, employing multiple antennas in a mobile terminal to achieve the transmit diversity in the uplink is not feasible due to the limited size of the mobile unit. In order to overcome this problem, a new mode of transmit diversity called cooperative diversity (CD) based on user cooperation, was proposed very recently. By user cooperation, it is meant that the sender transmits to the destination and copies to other users, called partners, for relaying to the destination. The antennas of the sender and the partners together form a multiple antenna situation. CD systems are immuned not only against small scale channel fading but also against large scale channel fading. On the other hand, CD systems are more sensitive to interuser (between sender and partner) transmission errors and user mobility. In this dissertation, we propose a bandwidth and power efficient CD system which could be accommodated with minimal modifications in the currently available direct or point-to-point communication systems. The proposed CD system is based on quadrature signaling (QS). With quadrature signaling, both sender’s and partners’ information symbols are transmitted simultaneously in his/her multiple access channels. It also reduces the synchronization as well as the interference problems that occur in the schemes reported in the literature. The performance of the proposed QS-CD system is analyzed at different layers. First, we study the bit error probability (BEP) of the QS-CD system for both fixed and adaptive relaying at the partner. It is shown from the BEP performance that the QS-CD system can achieve diversity order of two. Then, a cross-layer communication system is developed by combing the proposed QS-CD system at the physical layer and the truncated stop-and- wait automatic repeat request (ARQ) at the data link layer. The performance of the cross-layer system is analyzed and compared with existing schemes in the literature for performance metrics at the data link layer and upper layers, i.e., frame error rate, packet loss rate, average packet delay, throughput, etc. In addition, the studies show that the proposed QS-CD-ARQ system outperforms existing schemes when it has a good partner. In this respect, the proposed system is fully utilizing the communication channel and less complex in terms of implementation when compared with the existing systems. Since the partner selection gives significant impact on the performance of the CD systems, partner selection algorithms (PSAs) are extensively analyzed for both static and mobile user network. In this case, each individual user would like to take advantage of cooperation by choosing a suitable partner. The objective of an individual user may conflict with the objective of the network. In this regard, we would like to introduce a PSA which tries to balance both users and network objectives by taking user mobility into consideration. The proposed PSA referred to as worst link first (WLF), to choose the best partner in cooperative communication systems. The WLF algorithm gives priority to the worst link user to choose its partner and to maximize the energy gain of the radio cell. It is easy to implement not only in centralized networks but also in distributed networks with or without the global knowledge of users in the network. The proposed WLF matching algorithm, being less complex than the optimal maximum weighted (MW) matching and the heuristic based Greedy matching algorithms, yields performance characteristics close to those of MW matching algorithm and better than the Greedy matching algorithm in both static and mobile user networks. Furthermore, the proposed matching algorithm provides around 10dB energy gain with optimal power allocation over a non-cooperative system which is equivalent to prolonging the cell phone battery recharge time by about ten times.

With the rapid growth of multimedia applications and the advances of wireless communication technologies, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services in heterogeneous wireless networks has been an important issue and drawn much attention from both academia and industry. Due to the hostile transmission environment and limited radio resources, QoS provisioning in wireless networks is much more complex and difficult than in its wired counterpart. Moreover, due to the lack of central controller in the networks, distributed network control is required, adding complexity to QoS provisioning. In this thesis, medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning is investigated for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. Originally designed for high-rate data traffic, a WLAN has limited capability to support delay-sensitive voice traffic, and the service for voice traffic may be impacted by data traffic load, resulting in delay violation or large delay variance. Aiming at addressing these limitations, we propose an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition to supporting voice traffic, providing better services for data traffic in WLANs is another focus of our research. In the current WLANs, all the data traffic receives the same best-effort service, and it is difficult to provide further service differentiation for data traffic based on some specific requirements of customers or network service providers. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel token-based scheduling scheme, which provides great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management. As a WLAN has small coverage and cannot meet the growing demand for wireless service requiring communications ``at anywhere and at anytime", a large scale multi-hop wireless network (e.g., wireless ad hoc networks and wireless mesh networks) becomes a necessity. Due to the location-dependent contentions, a number of problems (e.g., hidden/exposed terminal problem, unfairness, and priority reversal problem) appear in a multi-hop wireless environment, posing more challenges for QoS provisioning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks, and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is an appealing transmission technology for short-range, bandwidth demanded wireless communications. With the data rate of several hundred megabits per second, UWB demonstrates great potential in supporting multimedia streams such as high-definition television (HDTV), voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and console gaming in office or home networks, known as the wireless personal area network (WPAN). While vast research effort has been made on the physical layer issues of UWB, the corresponding medium access control (MAC) protocols that exploit UWB technology have not been well developed. Given an extremely wide bandwidth of UWB, a fundamental problem on how to manage multiple users to efficiently utilize the bandwidth is a MAC design issue. Without explicitly considering the physical properties of UWB, existing MAC protocols are not optimized for UWB-based networks. In addition, the limited processing capability of UWB devices poses challenges to the design of low-complexity MAC protocols. In this thesis, we comprehensively investigate the MAC protocols for UWB networks. The objective is to link the physical characteristics of UWB with the MAC protocols to fully exploit its advantage. We consider two themes: centralized and distributed UWB networks. For centralized networks, the most critical issue surrounding the MAC protocol is the resource allocation with fairness and quality of service (QoS) provisioning. We address this issue by breaking down into two scenarios: homogeneous and heterogeneous network configurations. In the homogeneous case, users have the same bandwidth requirement, and the objective of resource allocation is to maximize the network throughput. In the heterogeneous case, users have different bandwidth requirements, and the objective of resource allocation is to provide differentiated services. For both design objectives, the optimal scheduling problem is NP-hard. Our contributions lie in the development of low-complexity scheduling algorithms that fully exploit the characteristics of UWB. For distributed networks, the MAC becomes node-based problems, rather than link-based problems as in centralized networks. Each node either contends for channel access or reserves transmission opportunity through negotiation. We investigate two representative protocols that have been adopted in the WiMedia specification for future UWB-based WPANs. One is a contention-based protocol called prioritized channel access (PCA), which employs the same mechanisms as the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) in IEEE 802.11e for providing differentiated services. The other is a reservation-based protocol called distributed reservation protocol (DRP), which allows time slots to be reserved in a distributed manner. Our goal is to identify the capabilities of these two protocols in supporting multimedia applications for UWB networks. To achieve this, we develop analytical models and conduct detailed analysis for respective protocols. The proposed analytical models have several merits. They are accurate and provide close-form expressions with low computational effort. Through a cross-layer approach, our analytical models can capture the near-realistic protocol behaviors, thus useful insights into the protocol can be obtained to improve or fine-tune the protocol operations. The proposed models can also be readily extended to incorporate more sophisticated considerations, which should benefit future UWB network design.

This thesis contributes toward understanding fundamental limits of multi-user fading channels and random wireless networks. Specifically, considering different samples of channel gains corresponding to different users/nodes in a multi-user wireless system, the maximum number of channel gains supporting a minimum rate is asymptotically obtained. First, the user capacity of fading multi-user channels with minimum rates is analyzed. Three commonly used fading models, namely, Rayleigh, Rician and Nakagami are considered. For broadcast channels, a power allocation scheme is proposed to maximize the number of active receivers, for each of which, a minimum rate Rmin>0 can be achieved. Under the assumption of independent Rayleigh fading channels for different receivers, as the total number of receivers n goes to infinity, the maximum number of active receivers is shown to be arbitrarily close to ln(P.ln(n))/Rmin with probability approaching one, where P is the total transmit power. The results obtained for Rayleigh fading are extended to the cases of Rician and Nakagami fading models. Under the assumption of independent Rician fading channels for different receivers, as the total number of receivers n goes to infinity, the maximum number of active receivers is shown to be equal to ln(2P.ln(n))/Rmin with probability approaching one. For broadcast channels with Nakagami fading, the maximum number of active receivers is shown to be equal to ln(ω/μ.P.ln(n))/Rmin with probability approaching one, where ω and μ are the Nakagami distribution parameters. A by-product of the results is to also provide a power allocation strategy that maximizes the total throughput subject to the rate constraints. In multiple-access channels, the maximum number of simultaneous active transmitters (i.e. user capacity) is obtained in the many user case in which a minimum rate must be maintained for all active users. The results are presented in the form of scaling laws as the number of transmitters increases. It is shown that for all three fading distributions, the user capacity scales double logarithmically in the number of users and differs only by constants depending on the distributions. We also show that a scheduling policy that maximizes the number of simultaneous active transmitters can be implemented in a distributed fashion. Second, the maximum number of active links supporting a minimum rate is asymptotically obtained in a wireless network with an arbitrary topology. It is assumed that each source-destination pair communicates through a fading channel and destinations receive interference from all other active sources. Two scenarios are considered: 1) Small networks with multi-path fading, 2) Large Random networks with multi-path fading and path loss. In the first case, under the assumption of independent Rayleigh fading channels for different source-destination pairs, it is shown that the optimal number of active links is of the order log(N) with probability approaching one as the total number of nodes, N, tends to infinity. The achievable total throughput also scales logarithmically with the total number of links/nodes in the network. In the second case, a two-dimensional large wireless network is considered and it is assumed that nodes are Poisson distributed with a finite intensity. Under the assumption of independent multi-path fading for different source-destination pairs, it is shown that the optimal number of active links is of the order N with probability approaching one. As a result, the achievable per-node throughput obtained by multi-hop routing scales with Θ(1/√N).

A primary challenge in wireless networks is to use available resources efficiently so that the Quality of Service (QoS) is satisfied while maximizing the throughput of the network. Among different resource allocation strategies, power and spectrum allocations have long been regarded as efficient tools to mitigate interference and improve the throughput of the network. Also, achieving a low transmission delay is an important QoS requirement in buffer-limited networks, particularly for users with real-time services. For these networks, too much delay results in dropping some packets. Therefore, the main challenge in networks with real-time services is to utilize an efficient power allocation scheme so that the delay is minimized while achieving a high throughput. This dissertation deals with these problems in distributed wireless networks.

The high deployment and maintenance costs of last mile wireline networks (i.e., DSL and cable networks) have urged service providers to search for new cost-effective solutions to provide broadband connectivity. Broadband wireless access (BWA) networks, which offer a wide coverage area and high transmission rates in addition to their fast and low-cost deployment, have emerged as an alternative to last mile wireline networks. Therefore, BWA networks are expected to be deployed in areas with different terrain profiles (e.g., urban, suburban, rural) where wireless communication faces different channel impairments. This fact necessitates the adoption of various transmission technologies that combat the channel impairments of each profile. Implementation scenarios of BWA networks considered in this thesis are multicarrier-based direct transmission and single carrier-based cooperative transmission scenarios. The performance of these transmission technologies highly depends on how resources are allocated. In this thesis, we focus on the development of practical resource allocation schemes for the mentioned BWA networks implementation scenarios. In order to develop practical schemes, the imperfection of channel state information (CSI) and computational power limitations are among considered practical implementation issues. The design of efficient resource allocation schemes at the MAC layer heavily relies on the CSI reported from the PHY layer as a measure of the wireless channel condition. The channel estimation error and feedback delay renders the reported CSI erroneous. The inaccuracy in CSI propagates to higher layers, resulting in performance degradation. Although this effect is intuitive, a quantitative measure of this degradation is necessary for the design of practical resource allocation schemes. An approach to the evaluation of the ergodic mutual information that reflects this degradation is developed for single carrier, multicarrier, direct, and cooperative scenarios with inaccurate CSI. Given the CSI estimates and estimation error statistics, the presented evaluation of ergodic mutual information can be used in resource allocation and in assessing the severity of estimation error on performance degradation. A point-to-multipoint (PMP) network that employs orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is considered as one of the most common implementation scenarios of BWA networks. Replacing wireline networks requires not only providing the last mile connectivity to subscribers but also supporting their diverse services with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Therefore, the resource allocation problem (i.e., subcarriers, rate and power allocation) is modeled as a network utility maximization (NUM) one that captures the characteristics of this implementation scenario. A dual decomposition-based resource allocation scheme that takes into consideration the diversity of service requirements and inaccuracy of the CSI estimation is developed. Numerical evaluations and simulations are conducted to validate our theoretical claims that the scheme maximizes resource utilization, coordinates with the call admission controller to guarantee QoS, and accounts for CSI inaccuracy. Cooperation has recently received great attention from the research community and industry because of its low cost and fast deployment in addition to the performance improvement it brings to BWA networks. In cooperative scenarios, subscribers cooperate to relay each other's signals. For this implementation scenario of BWA networks, a robust and constrained Kalman filter-based power allocation scheme is proposed to minimize power consumption and guarantee bit error probability (BEP) requirements. The proposed scheme is robust to CSI inaccuracy, responsive to changes in BEP requirements, and optimal in allocating resources. In summary, research results presented in this thesis contribute to the development of practical resource allocation schemes for BWA networks.

An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile wireless devices that cooperate with each other to route packets amongst themselves. The main difficulty in designing routing algorithms for such a network is the large number of topology changes that the network undergoes due to device movement. Selective flooding is a routing technique that is more resilient to topology changes than traditional algorithms but is more bandwidth efficient than pure flooding. An on-demand selective flooding algorithm has been designed and tested on the ns-2 simulator. In scenarios involving a large number of topology changes, selective flooding outperforms other ad hoc network routing techniques. Unfortunately, selective flooding is much more bandwidth hungry and is unable to scale to handle reasonable traffic loads. Interestingly, the analysis of selective flooding reveals major problems with traditional ad hoc networking techniques. Many current algorithms demonstrate shortcomings when dealing with bursty traffic, and current wireless hardware cannot handle ad hoc networking traffic in an efficient manner. These issues need to be addressed before ad hoc networking technology can become feasible for widespread use.

Next generation wireless communication systems are expected to provide a variety of services including voice, data and video. The rapidly growing demand for these services needs high data rate wireless communication systems with reliability and high user capacity. Recently, it has been shown that reliability and achievable data rate of wireless communication systems increases dramatically by employing multiple transmit and receive antennas. Transmit diversity is a powerful technique for combating multipath fading in wireless communications. However, employing multiple antennas in a mobile terminal to achieve the transmit diversity in the uplink is not feasible due to the limited size of the mobile unit. In order to overcome this problem, a new mode of transmit diversity called cooperative diversity (CD) based on user cooperation, was proposed very recently. By user cooperation, it is meant that the sender transmits to the destination and copies to other users, called partners, for relaying to the destination. The antennas of the sender and the partners together form a multiple antenna situation. CD systems are immuned not only against small scale channel fading but also against large scale channel fading. On the other hand, CD systems are more sensitive to interuser (between sender and partner) transmission errors and user mobility. In this dissertation, we propose a bandwidth and power efficient CD system which could be accommodated with minimal modifications in the currently available direct or point-to-point communication systems. The proposed CD system is based on quadrature signaling (QS). With quadrature signaling, both sender’s and partners’ information symbols are transmitted simultaneously in his/her multiple access channels. It also reduces the synchronization as well as the interference problems that occur in the schemes reported in the literature. The performance of the proposed QS-CD system is analyzed at different layers. First, we study the bit error probability (BEP) of the QS-CD system for both fixed and adaptive relaying at the partner. It is shown from the BEP performance that the QS-CD system can achieve diversity order of two. Then, a cross-layer communication system is developed by combing the proposed QS-CD system at the physical layer and the truncated stop-and- wait automatic repeat request (ARQ) at the data link layer. The performance of the cross-layer system is analyzed and compared with existing schemes in the literature for performance metrics at the data link layer and upper layers, i.e., frame error rate, packet loss rate, average packet delay, throughput, etc. In addition, the studies show that the proposed QS-CD-ARQ system outperforms existing schemes when it has a good partner. In this respect, the proposed system is fully utilizing the communication channel and less complex in terms of implementation when compared with the existing systems. Since the partner selection gives significant impact on the performance of the CD systems, partner selection algorithms (PSAs) are extensively analyzed for both static and mobile user network. In this case, each individual user would like to take advantage of cooperation by choosing a suitable partner. The objective of an individual user may conflict with the objective of the network. In this regard, we would like to introduce a PSA which tries to balance both users and network objectives by taking user mobility into consideration. The proposed PSA referred to as worst link first (WLF), to choose the best partner in cooperative communication systems. The WLF algorithm gives priority to the worst link user to choose its partner and to maximize the energy gain of the radio cell. It is easy to implement not only in centralized networks but also in distributed networks with or without the global knowledge of users in the network. The proposed WLF matching algorithm, being less complex than the optimal maximum weighted (MW) matching and the heuristic based Greedy matching algorithms, yields performance characteristics close to those of MW matching algorithm and better than the Greedy matching algorithm in both static and mobile user networks. Furthermore, the proposed matching algorithm provides around 10dB energy gain with optimal power allocation over a non-cooperative system which is equivalent to prolonging the cell phone battery recharge time by about ten times.

With the rapid growth of multimedia applications and the advances of wireless communication technologies, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services in heterogeneous wireless networks has been an important issue and drawn much attention from both academia and industry. Due to the hostile transmission environment and limited radio resources, QoS provisioning in wireless networks is much more complex and difficult than in its wired counterpart. Moreover, due to the lack of central controller in the networks, distributed network control is required, adding complexity to QoS provisioning. In this thesis, medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning is investigated for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. Originally designed for high-rate data traffic, a WLAN has limited capability to support delay-sensitive voice traffic, and the service for voice traffic may be impacted by data traffic load, resulting in delay violation or large delay variance. Aiming at addressing these limitations, we propose an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition to supporting voice traffic, providing better services for data traffic in WLANs is another focus of our research. In the current WLANs, all the data traffic receives the same best-effort service, and it is difficult to provide further service differentiation for data traffic based on some specific requirements of customers or network service providers. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel token-based scheduling scheme, which provides great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management. As a WLAN has small coverage and cannot meet the growing demand for wireless service requiring communications ``at anywhere and at anytime", a large scale multi-hop wireless network (e.g., wireless ad hoc networks and wireless mesh networks) becomes a necessity. Due to the location-dependent contentions, a number of problems (e.g., hidden/exposed terminal problem, unfairness, and priority reversal problem) appear in a multi-hop wireless environment, posing more challenges for QoS provisioning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks, and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme.