| Summary: | How to improve the radio resource utilization and provide better
quality-of-service (QoS) is an everlasting challenge to the
designers of wireless networks. As an indispensable element of
the solution to the above task, medium access control (MAC)
protocols coordinate the stations and resolve the channel access
contentions so that the scarce radio resources are shared fairly
and efficiently among the participating users. With a given
physical layer, a properly designed MAC protocol is the key to
desired system performance, and directly affects the perceived QoS
of end users.
Distributed random access protocols are widely used MAC protocols
in both infrastructure-based and infrastructureless wireless
networks. To understand the characteristics of these protocols,
there have been enormous efforts on their performance study by
means of analytical modeling in the literature. However, the
existing approaches are inflexible to adapt to different protocol
variants and traffic situations, due to either many unrealistic
assumptions or high complexity.
In this thesis, we propose a simple and scalable generic
performance analysis framework for a family of carrier sense
multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based
distributed MAC protocols, regardless of the detailed backoff and
channel access policies, with more realistic and fewer
assumptions. It provides a systematic approach to the performance
study and comparison of diverse MAC protocols in various
situations. Developed from the viewpoint of a tagged station, the
proposed framework focuses on modeling the backoff and channel
access behavior of an individual station. A set of fixed point
equations is obtained based on a novel three-level renewal process
concept, which leads to the fundamental MAC performance metric,
average frame service time. With this result, the important
network saturation throughput is then obtained straightforwardly.
The above distinctive approach makes the proposed analytical
framework unified for both saturated and unsaturated stations.
The proposed framework is successfully applied to study and
compare the performance of three representative distributed MAC
protocols: the legacy p-persistent CSMA/CA protocol, the IEEE
802.15.4 contention access period MAC protocol, and the IEEE
802.11 distributed coordination function, in a network with
homogeneous service. It is also extended naturally to study the
effects of three prevalent mechanisms for prioritized channel
access in a network with service differentiation. In particular,
the novel concepts of ``virtual backoff event'' and ``pre-backoff
waiting periods'' greatly simplify the analysis of the arbitration
interframe space mechanism, which is the most challenging one
among the three, as shown in the previous works reported in the
literature. The comparison with comprehensive simulations shows
that the proposed analytical framework provides accurate
performance predictions in a broad range of stations. The results
obtained provide many helpful insights into how to improve the
performance of current protocols and design better new ones.
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