Using 802.11 medium access control layer measurements to understand and improve network performance

This webpage details work performed on the Science Foundation Ireland Research Frontiers Grant RFP-07-ENEF530.

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) employing IEEE 802.11 technology have become pervasive in home, office and hot-spot environments. It enables cheap, easy deployment of connectivity without troublesome and expensive cabling. There is a large, commercially driven effort to expand its usage-case to networks where wireless links are used to relay data beyond a single hop. Although ubiquitous, at its heart 802.11 a complex, distributed random access system. This project builds on recent advances in mathematical modelling and instrumented networks by tightly knitting theoretical work with experimental measurements to advance the understanding and performance of these WLANs.

Group personnel

Ken Duffy
Minyu Fang
Kaidi Huang
David Malone

ENEF530 Reports

• Decentralised Learning MACs for Collision-free Access in WLANs.
  M. Fang, D. Malone, K. R. Duffy and D. J. Leith.
  Submitted.
• The 802.11g 6 Mb/s rate is less robust than 11 Mb/s.
  K. D. Huang, D. Malone and K. R. Duffy.
  IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 10 (4), 1015-1020, 2011.
• H-RCA: 802.11 Collision-aware Rate Control.
  K. D. Huang, K. R. Duffy and D. Malone.
  Submitted.
• On the validity of IEEE 802.11 MAC modeling hypotheses.
  K. D. Huang, K. R. Duffy and D. Malone.
  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 18 (6), 1935-1948, 2010.
• Mean field Markov models of wireless local area networks.
  K. R. Duffy.
  Markov Processes and Related Fields, 16 (2), 295-328, 2010.
• Experimental verification of a radio-frequency power model for Wi-Fi technology.
  M. Fang and D. Malone.
  Health Physics, 98(4):574-583, April 2010.
• On a buffering hypothesis in 802.11 analytic models.
  K. D. Huang and K. R. Duffy
  IEEE Communications Letters, 13 (5), 312-314, 2009.
  
• Complexity analysis of a decentralised graph colouring algorithm.
  K. R. Duffy, N. O'Connell and A. Sapozhnikov.
  Information Processing Letters, 107 (2), 60-63, 2008.
• Investigating the validity of IEEE 802.11 MAC modeling hypotheses.
  K. D. Huang, K. R. Duffy, D. Malone and D. J. Leith.
  IEEE PIMRC, 15-18th September 2008, Cannes, France.