The proper setting of contention window (CW) values has a significant impact on the efficiency of Wi-Fi networks. Unfortunately, the standard method used by 802.11 networks is not scalable enough to maintain stable throughput for an increasing number of stations, yet it remains the default method of channel access for 802.11ax single-user transmissions. Therefore, we propose a new method of CW control, which leverages deep reinforcement learning (DRL) principles to learn the correct settings under different network conditions. Our method, called centralized contention window optimization with DRL (CCOD), supports two trainable control algorithms: deep Q-network (DQN) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). We demonstrate through simulations that it offers efficiency close to optimal (even in dynamic topologies) while keeping computational cost low.
Rice University（莱斯大学）；US Army’s CCDC Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军CCDC陆军研究实验室）
We study the problem of adaptive contention window (CW) design for random-access wireless networks. More precisely, our goal is to design an intelligent node that can dynamically adapt its minimum CW (MCW) parameter to maximize a network-level utility knowing neither the MCWs of other nodes nor how these change over time. To achieve this goal, we adopt a reinforcement learning (RL) framework where we circumvent the lack of system knowledge with local channel observations and we reward actions that lead to high utilities. To efficiently learn these preferred actions, we follow a deep Q-learning…
Nowadays, Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X) networks are actively developing. Most of the already deployed V2X networks are based on the IEEE 802.11p standard. However, these networks can provide only basic V2X applications and will unlikely fulfill stringent requirements of modern V2X applications. Thus, the IEEE has launched a new IEEE 802.11bd standard. A significant novelty of this standard is channel bonding. IEEE 802.11bd describes two channel bonding techniques, which differ from the legacy one used in modern Wi-Fi networks. Our study performs a comparative analysis of the various channel bon…
Last year, IEEE 802.11 Extremely High Throughput Study Group (EHT Study Group) was established to initiate discussions on new IEEE 802.11 features. Coordinated control methods of the access points (APs) in the wireless local area networks (WLANs) are discussed in EHT Study Group. The present study proposes a deep reinforcement learning-based channel allocation scheme using graph convolutional networks (GCNs). As a deep reinforcement learning method, we use a well-known method double deep Q-network. In densely deployed WLANs, the number of the available topologies of APs is extremely high, and …
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Qualcomm Research Center（高通研究中心）
The increasing number of wireless devices operating in unlicensed spectrum motivates the development of intelligent adaptive approaches to spectrum access. We consider decentralized contention-based medium access for base stations (BSs) operating on unlicensed shared spectrum, where each BS autonomously decides whether or not to transmit on a given resource. The contention decision attempts to maximize not its own downlink throughput, but rather a network-wide objective. We formulate this problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process with a novel reward structure that…
IEEE 802.11ad specifies a hybrid medium access control (MAC) protocol consisting of contention as well as noncontention-based channel access mechanisms. Further, it also employs directional antennas to compensate for the high freespace path loss observed in 60GHz frequency band. Therefore, it significantly differs from other IEEE 802.11(b/g/n/ac) MAC protocols and thus requires new methods to analyze its performance. In this paper, we propose a new analytical model for performance analysis of IEEE 802.11ad employing a threedimensional Markov chain considering all the features of IEEE 802.11ad …
The increasing interest for ubiquitous networking, and the tremendous popularity gained by IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) in recent years, is leading to very dense deployments where high levels of channel contention may prevent to meet the increasing users' demands. To mitigate the negative effects of channel contention, the Target Wake Time (TWT) mechanism included in the IEEE 802.11ax amendment can have a significant role, as it provides an extremely simple but effective mechanism to schedule transmissions in time. Moreover, in addition to reduce the contention between stat…
The IEEE 802.11ad standard extends WiFi operation to the millimeter wave frequencies, and introduces novel features concerning both the physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers. However, while there are extensive research efforts to develop mechanisms for establishing and maintaining directional links for mmWave communications, fewer works deal with transmission scheduling and the hybrid MAC introduced by the standard. The hybrid MAC layer provides for two different kinds of resource allocations: Contention Based Access Periods (CBAPs) and contention free Service Periods (SPs). In…
We propose and experimentally evaluate a novel method that dynamically changes the contention window of access points based on system load to improve performance in a dense Wi-Fi deployment. A key feature is that no MAC protocol changes, nor client side modifications are needed to deploy the solution. We show that setting an optimal contention window can lead to throughput and latency improvements up to 155%, and 50%, respectively. Furthermore, we devise an online learning method that efficiently finds the optimal contention window with minimal training data, and yields an average improvement …
60GHz wireless local area networks (WLANs) standards (e.g., IEEE 802.11ad and IEEE 802.15.3c) employ hybrid MAC protocols consisting of contention based access using CSMA/CA as well as dedicated service periods using time division multiple access (TDMA). To provide the channel access in the contention part of the protocol, quasi omni (QO) antenna patterns are defined which span over the particular spatial directions and cover a limited area around access points. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to determine the beamwidth of each QO level. The proposed algorithm takes into account the spa…
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol introduced in IEEE802.15.4e standard, addressing low power requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Lossy Networks (LLNs). The 6TiSCH Operation sublayer (6top) of IEEE802.15.4e defines the schedule that includes sleep, transmit and receive routines of the nodes. However, the design of schedule is not specified by the standard. In this paper, we propose a contention based proportional fairness (CBPF) transmission scheme for TSCH networks to maximize the system throughput addressing fair allocation of…
Recently designed cross-layer contention based synchronous MAC protocols like the PRMAC protocol, for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable a node to schedule multi-hop transmission of multiple data packets in a cycle. However, these systems accommodate both the request-to-send data process and the confirmation-to-send data process in the same data transmission scheduling window (i.e. data window). This reduces the length of the multi-hop flow setup in the data window. In a multi-hop scenario, this degrades both the packet delivery ratio (PDR) and the end-to-end transmission delay (E2ETD). In…
The recently released IEEE 802.15.6 standard specifies several physical (PHY) layers and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for variety of medical and non-medical applications of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). The medical applications of WBAN has several obligatory requirements and constrains viz. high reliability, strict delay deadlines and low power consumption. The standard IEEE 802.15.6 MAC scheme is not able to fulfil the all requirements of medical applications of WBAN. To address this issue we propose an IEEE 802.15.6-based MAC scheme that is the modification of superframe…
The IEEE 802.11ah amendment is designed to support upto 8K M2M devices over the Sub-GHz channel. To achieve this, it introduces new modifications to the PHY and MAC layers. A dynamic Restricted Access Window~(RAW) mechanism is introduced at the MAC layer. RAW splits the access for different devices into small chunks of time. Using the RAW mechanism, we propose a novel Delay and Energy Aware RAW Formation (DEARF) scheme to support delay sensitive devices along with other delay tolerant devices. We exploit this to introduce four new RAWs. These new RAWs help split the access into contention free…
The latest IEEE 802.11 amendments provide support to directional communications in the Millimeter Wave spectrum and, thanks to the wide bandwidth available at such frequencies, makes it possible to wirelessly approach several emergent use cases, such as virtual and augmented reality, telepresence, and remote control of industrial facilities. However, these applications require stringent Quality of Service, that only contention-free scheduling algorithms can guarantee. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for the joint admission control and scheduling of periodic traffic streams ov…
Motivated by the emerging delay-sensitive applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a resurgence of interest in developing medium access control (MAC) protocols in a time-slotted framework. The resource-constrained, ad-hoc nature of wireless networks typical of the IoT also forces the amount of control information exchanged across the network -- required to make scheduling decisions -- to a minimum. In a previous article we proposed a protocol called QZMAC that (i) provides provably low mean delay, (ii) has distributed control (i.e., there is no central scheduler), and (iii)…
In this paper, we propose a swarming approach and optimize the one-hop delay for interplatoon communications through adjusting the minimum contention window size of each backbone vehicle in two steps. In the first step, we first set a small enough average one-hop delay as the initial optimization goal and then propose a swarming approach to find a minimum average one-hop delay for inter-platoon communications through adjusting the minimum contention window of each backbone vehicle iteratively. In the second step, we first set the minimum average one-hop delay found in the first step as the ini…
The IEEE 802.11 backoff algorithm is very important for controlling system throughput over contentionbased wireless networks. For this reason, there are many studies on wireless network performance focus on developing backoff algorithms. However, most existing models are based on saturated traffic loads, which are not a real representation of actual network conditions. In this paper, a dynamic control backoff time algorithm is proposed to enhance both delay and throughput performance of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function. This algorithm considers the distinction between high and…
IEEE 802.11be networks (aka Wi-Fi 7) will have to cope with new bandwidth-hungry and low-latency services such as eXtended Reality and multi-party cloud gaming. With this goal in mind, transmit opportunity (TXOP) sharing between coordinated access points (APs) may contribute to alleviating inter-AP contention, hence increasing the overall network throughput. This paper evaluates two coordinated TXOP sharing strategies: coordinated time division multiple access (c-TDMA) and coordinated-TDMA with spatial reuse (c-TDMA/SR). We show that, while c-TDMA alone does not result in any significant impro…
Full-duplex (FD) technology is likely to be adopted in various legacy communications standards. The IEEE 802.11ax working group has been considering a simultaneous transmit and receive (STR) mode for the next generation wireless local area networks (WLANs). Enabling STR mode (FD communication mode) in 802.11 networks creates bi-directional FD (BFD) and uni-directional FD (UFD) links. The key challenge is to integrate STR mode with minimal protocol modifications, while considering the co-existence of FD and legacy half-duplex (HD) stations (STAs) and backwards compatibility. This paper proposes…
BLADE: Adaptive Wi-Fi Contention Control for Next-Generation Real-Time Communication
Tencent（腾讯）；Peking University（北京大学）；University at Buffalo, SUNY（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, China（中国人工智能研究所）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
针对云游戏等实时通信中Wi-Fi网络长尾延迟问题，BLADE通过自适应调整 contention windows 实现动态竞争控制，显著降低尾部延迟并稳定MAC吞吐量。
The end-to-end throughput of multi-hop communication in wireless ad hoc networks is affected by the conflict between forwarding nodes. It has been shown that sending more packets than maximum achievable end-to-end throughput not only fails to increase throughput, but also decreases throughput owing to high contention and collision. Accordingly, it is of crucial importance for a source node to know the maximum end-to-end throughput. The end-to-end throughput depends on multiple factors, such as physical layer limitations, MAC protocol properties, routing policy and nodes distribution. There hav…
The new IEEE 802.11 standard, IEEE 802.11ax, has the challenging goal of serving more users compared to its predecessor IEEE 802.11ac, enabling consistent and reliable streams of data (average throughput) per station. In this paper we explore some of the IEEE 802.11ax new mechanisms and compare between the upper bounds on the throughputs of the Downlink unidirectional UDP Multi Users (MU) triadic based on Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) transmission multiplexing format in IEEE 802.11ax vs. IEEE 802.11ac in the Single User (SU) …
The new IEEE 802.11 standard, IEEE 802.11ax, has the challenging goal of serving more Uplink (UL) traffic and users as compared with his predecessor IEEE 802.11ac, en- abling consistent and reliable streams of data (average throughput) per station. In this paper we explore several new IEEE 802.11ax UL scheduling mechanisms and compare between the maximum throughputs of unidirectional UDP Multi Users (MU) triadic. The evaluation is conducted based on Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Acceess (OFDMA) transmission multiplexing format in IEEE 802.11ax…
The current cellular standardization for 5G is working towards wireless advances to enable further productivity for industrial automation. However, this development will take several years. Meanwhile, the capabilities of the currently available standards should be pushed to their limits. To this end, in this work, we present results from the first inter-slot successive interference cancellation testbed using commercial off the shelf IEEE 802.15.4 sensors. Through our implementation, we have measured a throughput of $0.72$ packets per slot which doubles the currently used contention-based acces…
In highly-dense IEEE 802.11 deployments, areas covered by multiple Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) will be common. This opens the door for stations equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11 interfaces to use several WLANs simultaneously, which not only may improve user experience, achieving a better connection with higher throughput and resilience; but it may also improve the network utilization. In this paper we investigate such a scenario. First, using a test-bed, consisting of a single station equipped with two interfaces and two access points, we observe that the file transfer time between t…
We describe a new synchronous and distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol for multihop wireless networks that provides bandwidth guarantees to unicast connections. Our MAC protocol is based on a slotted time division multiple access (TDMA) architecture, with a multi-mini-slotted signaling phase scheduling data transmissions over slots in the following data phase. Resolving contentions at the beginning of a frame allows for effective utilization of bandwidth. Our protocol essentially combines the benefits of TDMA architecture with the distributed reservation mechanism of IEEE 802.11 MA…
As new networking paradigms emerge for different networking applications, e.g., cyber-physical systems, and different services are handled under a converged data link technology, e.g., Ethernet, certain applications with mission critical traffic cannot coexist on the same physical networking infrastructure using traditional Ethernet packet-switched networking protocols. The IEEE 802.1Q Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) task group is developing protocol standards to provide deterministic properties on Ethernet based packet-switched networks. In particular, the IEEE 802.1Qcc, centralized managemen…
IEEE 802.11 networks have a great role to play in supporting and deploying of the Internet of Things (IoT). The realization of IoT depends on the ability of the network to handle a massive number of stations and transmissions, and to support Quality of Service (QoS). IEEE 802.11 networks enable the QoS by applying the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) with static parameters regardless of existing network capacity or which Access Category (AC) of QoS is already active. Our objective in this paper is to improve the efficiency of the uplink access in 802.11 networks; therefore we propose…
In this paper, we propose Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-aware cross layer scheduling algorithms in a multipoint-to-point network such as the uplink of an IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) network. Inadequate bandwidth allocation to a TCP flow may lead to timeout and since TCP source drops its congestion window ($cwnd$) immediately after a timeout, it may affect the average throughput adversely. On the other hand, since the TCP source increases its $cwnd$ only linearly upon the availability of bandwidth, any excess assignment of bandwidth may remain underutilized. The proposed scheduling algorithms add…
The choice of feedback mechanism between delay and packet loss has long been a point of contention in TCP congestion control. This has partly been resolved, as it has become increasingly evident that delay based methods are needed to facilitate modern interactive web applications. However, what has not been resolved is what control should be used, with the two candidates being the congestion window and the pacing rate. BBR is a new delay based congestion control algorithm that uses a pacing rate as its primary control and the congestion window as a secondary control. We propose that a congesti…
