The Internet has mainly been interconnecting stationary computers by wired links, but an increasing number of mobile clients require wireless communication. One way to connect these clients is to use the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System, UMTS. UMTS is a third generation mobile system. A network can be seen as nodes interconnected by links. The functionality of the nodes can be described as a layered hierarchy. A reference model for this hierarchy was developed by OSI. In this model the second lowest layer is called data link layer. The data link layer is responsible for making the raw transmission appear error free to upper layers. The focus for this thesis is the data link layer in the UMTS. Compared to the data link layer in a wired scenario it contains more control and error correction mechanisms. These mechanisms use a lot of timers and triggers, which makes it very difficult to analyze them mathematically. Therefore simulation is the preferred method. For the simulations the network simulator version 2 was used. This is an open source discrete event simulator. It has a modularized wireless stack already implemented. This can not be used to simulate UMTS though. Some modules in this stack were replaced by a new implementation to make simulations on UMTS possible. Tests were performed on the new implementation and the results were what could be expected. The results were also consistent with previous research in the area.

This thesis involved a research of mechanisms of MAC layer in the ad-hoc networks environment, the ad-hoc networks in the terminology of the standard are called IBSS Independent Basic Service, these type of networks are very useful in real situation where there are not the possibility of display a infrastructure, when there isn’t a network previous planning. The connection to a new network is one of the different with the most common type of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) that are the ones with infrastructure. The connection is established without the presence of a central station, instead the stations discover the others with broadcast messages in the coverage area of each station. In the context of standard 802.11 networks the communication between the stations is peer to peer, only with one hop. To continue with initiation process is necessary the synchronization between the different stations of his timers. The other capital mechanism that is treated is the medium access mechanism, to hold a shared and unreliable medium, all the heavy of this issue goes to the distributed coordination function DCF. In this moment there is an emergent technology, WIMAX or standard IEEE 802.16, like the standard 802.11 is a wireless communication protocol. Some comparison between the MAC layer mechanisms would be realized between these two standards

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.

Characteristics of wireless home and office services and the corresponding networking issues are discussed. Local Area Networking (LAN) and Personal Area Networking (PAN) technologies such as IEEE 802.11 and Ultra Wideband (UWB) are introduced. IEEE 802.11a and UWB systems are susceptible to interference from each other due to their overlapping frequencies. The major contribution of this work is to provide a framework for coexistence of the two systems. The interference between the two systems is evaluated theoretically by developing analytical models, and by simulations. It is shown that the interference from UWB on IEEE 802.11a systems is generally insignificant. IEEE 802.11a interference on UWB systems, however, is very critical and can significantly increase the bit error rate (BER) and degrade the throughput of the UWB system. A novel idea in the MAC layer is presented to mitigate this interference by means of temporal separation. Simulation results validate our technique. Implications to wireless home services such as high definition television (HDTV) are provided. Future research directions are discussed.

Dynamic optimal fragmentation with rate adaptation (DORA) is an algorithm to achieve maximum goodput in wireless mobile networks. With the analytical model that incorporates number of users, contentions, packet lengths, and bit error rates in the network, DORA computes a fragmentation threshold and transmits optimal sized packets with maximum rates. To estimate the SNR in the model, an adaptive on-demand UDP estimator is designed to reduce overheads. Test-beds to execute experiments for channel estimation, WLANs, Ad Hoc networks, and Vehicle-to-Vehicle networks are developed to evaluate the performance of DORA. DORA is an energy-efficient generic CSMA/CA MAC protocol for wireless mobile computing applications, and enhances system goodput in WLANs, Ad Hoc networks, and Vehicle-to-Vehicle networks without modification of the protocols.

It is a future trend to include the function of wireless networking in portable electronic devices, such as notebooks, tablet PC, PDA, mobile phone, and other information applicants. IEEE 802.11 is the most popular wireless LAN protocol that defines the functions in the medium access control (MAC) layer and physical layer. In this thesis, we design and implement a flexible and reusable soft IP (Intellectual Property) for wireless MAC that is compatible with AMBA system and can be used in SOC applications. The wireless MAC supports buffer descriptors, interrupt and DMA. The IP provides an AMBA-compatible interface for the host system bus, and provides a communication interface for the baseband processor in the physical layer.

IEEE 802.11 has become the standard in wireless LAN. Originally, 802.11 is designed for the best-effort services only. To support the increasing demand of delay-sensitive applications, IEEE 802.11 Task Group E is developing a QoS-aware MAC protocol, EDCF, for differentiated services. However, when the network becomes congested, there exists unexpected packet delay due to collisions and retransmissions. This thesis proposes a dynamic contention control (DCC) scheme to reduce packet delay and increase the percentage of packets arriving in time. DCC estimates per-hop delay, denoted as Mrtt, and end-to-end delay, denoted as Sigma_t, based on either the received MAC-layer ACK or the control packets of a reactive routing protocol. Then, Mrtt and Sigma_t are used to dynamically adjust the associated contention window for each priority. Besides, when a frame is retransmitted, the backoff time is determined according to the remaining end-to-end delay instead of a uniformly distributed random number. For the propose of evaluation, we perform simulations on the well-known network simulator, NS-2. DCC is compared with the EDCF and one previously proposed scheme, AEDCF. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of DCC.

The emerging widespread use of real-time multimedia applications over wireless networks makes the support of Quality of Service (QoS) a key problem. In this paper, we focus on QoS support mechanisms for IEEE 802.11 Wireless ad-hoc networks. First, we review the IEEE 802.11 standard and other enhanced MAC schemes that have been proposed to support QoS for 802.11 ad hoc networks. Then we propose a new priority MAC scheme which uses the different initial contention window instead of CWmin in IEEE 802.11 MAC to reduce the collision rate, then reduces the average delay and increases the throughput.

The promising development of wireless technologies has brought in an increasing demand of multimedia traffic. Since various types of traffic are inherently distinct in bandwidth requirements, delay sensitivities, and error tolerances, an adequate bandwidth allocation scheme is essential for the limited radio resource to fulfill different QoS (quality of service) requirements in mobile wireless networks. In this dissertation, we present a generalized channel preemption scheme (the GCPM) and a jamming-based medium access control with dynamic priority adjustment (the JMDPA) for the two different medium access models of a mobile wireless network, grant/request-based and contention-based, respectively. In the proposed GCPM, a mobile call is identified by four parameters, call type, traffic class, channel requirement, and preemption ratio. To effectively reduce dropping probability, high-priority handoff calls are allowed to fully or partially preempt low-priority ongoing calls when the mobile network becomes congested. An analytical model with multi-dimensional Markov chains is introduced to simultaneously investigate the effect of full and partial preemptions on the performance of a mobile wireless network. On the other hand, the proposed JMDPA scheme prioritizes a mobile node with two priorities, local and global; both of the local and global priorities can be dynamically changed based on the outcome in every contention round. Thus, any possible starvation of low-priority traffic or any ineffective contention of high-priority traffic can be avoided. A multi-dimensional Markov model, together with the scalability analysis, is introduced to evaluate the performance of the proposed JMDPA. The analytical results provide very useful guidelines to tune the QoS parameters for supporting prioritized multimedia traffic.

In this paper, we will provide an example of SoC for Information Appliance. We will use the SoC to reduce design-time and design-cost for IA products. Simultaneously, we will also enhance the Gigabit Ethernet Media- Access-Controller (MAC) with Hardware TCP/IP Checksum module. It can alleviate the CPU loads effectively, especially in longer length packets.