PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF HIGH SPEED WLANS INTRODUCTION:

In the field of communication Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is a Local Area network which does not require cables to connect different devices. The electromagnetic waves also known as radio waves are used for communication. Its become easy for the people to access the network from where they want; they are no longer limited by the length of the cable. This means that people can access the internet even outside their normal working environment, for example when they are at home, or riding on train. Setting up a wireless Local Area Network (LAN) can be done with one box, called the access point (AP). This box can handle a varying number of connections at the same time. Wired network needs cables to be laid. This can be difficult for certain places. Access point can serve a varying number of computers. To satisfy the need of wireless data networking, study group 802.11was formed under IEEE project 802 to recommend an international standard for WLANs. The IEEE accepted the specification in the year for 1997 and in the same year basic version 802.11 standard was released. IEEE 802.11 is a set of Media Access Control (MAC) layer and the Physical (PHY) layer specifications for implementing W LANs. Since then various versions of 802.11 have been released. The original version of the IEEE 802.11 standard was released in 1997 which works in the frequency range of 2.4 GHZ and data rates of 1-2Mbps, by using Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS). The 802.11a was come into existence from sep 1999 which works in the frequency range of GHZ and deliver data rate of 54Mbps. 802.11a utilizes OFDM encoding scheme. In the same year 802.11b was developed which is used for high data rates or Wi-Fi(up to 11Mbps) and works in the frequency range of 2.4GHZ ,it only make use of DSSS. 802.11e is another version of 802.11 which defines the Quality of Service (QOS) and it is used for multimedia support. The next amendment was made in year 2003 in the form of IEEE 802.11g which is used over short distance. The data rate of 802.11g is of 54 Mbps and frequency is 2.4 GHZ. The

802.11n was released in October 2009. It is having multiple input multiple-output (MIMO) features and utilizes the multi streaming modulation technique. Its maximum raw PHY rate varies from 54Mbps to 600Mbps. 802.11n uses four spatial streams at a channel width of 40MHz and operates on both the 2.4GHz and the lesser used 5GHz bands.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

It is well known that the medium access control (MAC) layer is main bottleneck to support multimedia applications [3]. But the MAC layer carries overhead such as back offs, distributed inter frame space(DIFS),acknowledgement (ACK),short inter frame space(SIFS) and PHY layer header[3] .In order to resolve these issues different schemes like Distributed coordinate function(DCF),Burst ACK ,block ACK ,Aggregation and AFR (aggregation with fragment retransmission) have been employed. We will discuss them one by one. First one is DCF (distributed coordinate function) which is the fundamental function to access the wireless medium provided by MAC layer. In IEEE 802.11 DCF [2], a station transmits a frame once it has observed an idle medium for a period of DIFS plus back-off duration. Note that the first transmission of a frame senses the media only for a period of DIFS. In order to notify the sender that the transmitted frame has been received successfully, a positive acknowledgment message (ACK) is required to be sent back. After receiving completely a correct data frame, the receiver sends back the corresponding ACK message after a period of SIFS.[3] By the broadcast nature of wireless communication [5] [6],the other stations located in the transmission range of the sender will receive the data frame. Those stations will, if they have any data to transmit, defer their transmissions until the receiver completes the transmission of the ACK message. After the transmission of the ACK message, the receiver and all the other stations defer a period of DIFS plus backoff duration again for the next round of transmission if they have any data to transmit. If an ACK is not received within the period of ACK Time Out most likely because a data frame is corrupted or because an ACK message is corrupted, the receivers defer their own transmission for an EIFS duration where T= TSIFS+ TPHYhdr+ TACK+ TDIFS The sender assumes that the frame transmission is failed(either due to collision, frame transmission errors or an ACK message transmission error). In this case, the sender has to schedule a retransmission of the same frame but it has to enter again the back-off process.

Each station has a contention window (CW) value which represents the maximum value of back-off duration [2]. When a frame transmission is failed, the sender has to double the size of CW until the CW value reaches a maximum contention window size CWmax after each successful transmission, CW is reset to the minimum contention window CWmin, hence CWmin CW CWmax The MAC Layer retrains the performance improvement due to its overhead which refers to the following delays: back-off, DIFS, acknowledgment delivery delay, SIFS and PHY header overhead. In DCF mechanism, a large frame is effective in a channel with low Bit Error Rate (BER). Anyhow, in a noisy channel with high BER, the performance degrades and the retransmission destructs the whole frame.

Burst ACK and Block ACK

The Burst ACK (e.g., [7], [8], and [9]) and Block ACK (e.g., [3] and [10]) schemes have been proposed in the literature for improving efficiency. Burst ACK performs the back off process once for a series of data and ACK frames , while Block ACK goes one step further by using a single ACK frame for multiple data frames, thus reducing the number of ACKs and SIFS. In both schemes, the back off time T CW is incurred once for M packet transmissions, where M is the size of a packet burst. With Burst ACK, the per-packet overhead is approximately TohP TohP

ThdrP hy +Thdr mac +TCW/M+TACK ThdrP hy +Thdr mac +TCW/M+ TACK/M

while for Block ACK it is

It can be seen that the contention overhead and MAC ACK overhead are amortized over multiple packets by these two schemes, therefore improving efficiency. However, the per-packet PHY header overhead and the MAC header overhead are left untouched. According to the proposal 802.11n [3] for the future WLANs, it is likely to take at least 44 s to transmit a PHY header (and 48 s when two antenna radios are used [4]). For comparison, the transmission duration of a 1024-B frame at a PHY rate of 216 Mbps is 40s, and at 432 Mbps is 20s. As the PHY rate is increased, the time to transmit a frame quickly becomes dominated by PHY headers, the MAC efficiency rapidly decreases, and efforts to increase the system capacity purely by increasing the data rate are thus of limited effectiveness even when Burst ACK or Block ACK are employed.

AGGREGATION SCHEME
In this scheme multiple packets are transmitted in a single large frame .hence it attempts to reduce the PHY overhead. Generally transmission of large frames in noisy channels are avoided because it can lead to reduction in throughput. In traditional retransmission schemes, a whole frame is retransmitted even if only one bit is lost. This raises the question of whether it is possible to retransmit only the erroneous part(s) of a frameif properly designed, such partial retransmission could be expected to improve performance This idea is actually great challenge for PHY and MAC technology. From the PHY point of view, PHY layer has to transmit very large frames and continue decoding even if the BER exceeds some previously unacceptable value. From the MAC Point of view, any retransmission scheme carries an associated signaling overhead and, hence, a tradeoff exists between system efficiency and the granularity of retransmission. Moreover, since real traffic is typically busty/on-off in nature, this raises questions as to the optimal policy for aggregating packets into framesfor example, how much time should the MAC wait for sufficient packets to arrive to form a large frame. Although aggregation is not a new idea, many fundamental questions remain open. How do we aggregate packets? The frames we want are larger than typical packets. If the packets from the upper layer are large and arrive rapidly, then aggregation is simple. If not, should a timing mechanism be used to wait for sufficient packets to arrive to form a large frame? If so, how much time do we wait to maximize throughput while minimizing delay? What is an appropriate (re)transmission unit? Should very large packets be divided for retransmissions? What is the aggregation throughput and delay performance? How does packet aggregation impact real world traffic, e.g., voice, video and TCP traffic? We will discuss these open questions in the next section.

AFR (AGGREGATION WITH FRAGMENT RETRANSMISSION)

To avoid repeated MAC redesigns, one basic question that we seek to answer is whether it is feasible to extend the 802.11 MAC to maintain high MAC efficiency regardless of PHY rates. We answer this in the affirmative. In particular, we identify fundamental properties that must be satisfied by any CSMA-/CA-based MAC layers and developed a novel scheme called aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) that exhibits these properties. In the AFR scheme, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame. If errors occur during the transmission, only the corrupted fragments of the large frame are retransmitted. In this scheme, a new delimitation mechanism allows for higher throughput with less overhead compared to previous designs. We study a fragmentation technique where packets longer than a threshold are divided into fragments before being aggregated. An analytic model is developed to evaluate the throughput and delay of AFR over noisy channels and to compare AFR with competing schemes. Optimal frame and fragment sizes are calculated using this model, and an algorithm for dividing packets into near-optimal fragments is designed.[11] A second question we seek to answer is whether higher transmission delays are an unavoidable result of using aggregation to achieve high throughput. In particular, is additional delay necessarily introduced 1) by the need to wait until sufficient packets arrive to allow a large frame to be formed, and 2) for transmission of a large frame? We answer this question in the negative. Specifically, we propose a zero-waiting mechanism where frames are transmitted immediately once the MAC wins a transmission opportunity. In a zero-waiting aggregation scheme, the frame sizes adapt automatically to the PHY rate and the channel state, thereby maximizing the MAC efficiency, While minimizing the holding delay.[11]

COMPARISON OF AFR WITH SIMILAR SCHEMES In this section, we compare the throughput performance of AFR with four other schemes proposed in the literature: Burst ACK, Block ACK Packet Concatenation (PAC) [12], and Aggregation [13]. These schemes can be classified into two categories: 1) Burst ACK and Block ACK; 2) PAC, Aggregation, and AFR. The schemes in the first category transmit multiple frames at each transmission opportunity. The schemes in the second category transmit only one frame and use packet aggregation. AFR is the only scheme to use both fragmentation and aggregation. In the Burst ACK and Block ACK schemes, collisions lead to the whole Burst/Block being lost while errors lead to retransmission only of the corrupted packet. The PAC scheme is similar to our AFR scheme, except that before each packet in a frame there is a sub physical-header, which is of 12s duration with an IEEE 802.11a PHY. The Aggregation scheme in [13] uses a special delimiter before each packet in a frame. None of these schemes fulfill the all the scalability conditions derived in Section III of AFR [11]. Because of the following. In Burst ACK and Block ACK a PHY header is transmitted before each packet. The PHY header duration has a minimum value. Due to which, the per-packet overhead does not decrease with increasing PHY rate. In PAC a sub physical header is transmitted before each packet, and hence per packet overhead does not reduce. Aggregation: Fragmentation is not included in this scheme. It has been found that the schemes using aggregation (the second category) consistently perform better than the Burst and Block ACK schemes. It can also be seen that the PAC scheme has the lowest throughput among schemes in the second category. This is due to the long duration of the sub physical header. AFR achieves the highest throughput regardless of the number of stations [11].

RATIONALE
Wireless LANs (WLANs) based on IEEE 802.11 technology are becoming increasingly popular. With the aim of supporting rich multimedia applications such as HDTV (20 Mbps) and DVD (9.8 Mbps), the technology trend is toward increasingly higher bandwidths. Some recent 802.11n proposals seek to support physical (PHY) layer rates of up to 600Mbps. However, higher PHY, it is well known that the MAC efficiency of 802.11 typically decreases with increasing PHY rates. The reason is that while increasing PHY rates lead to faster transmission of the MAC frame payloads, overhead such as PHY headers and contention time typically does not decrease at the same rate and thus begins to dominate frame transmission times. The problem here is a fundamental one for MAC design, namely that, due to cross-layer interactions, the throughput of the current 802.11 MAC does not scale well with increasing PHY rates. With continuing improvements in PHY technology and demand for higher throughput, the MAC scaling behavior is of key importance. While the current focus of 802.11n activity is on achieving 100-Mbps throughput at the MAC layer, still higher target data rates can be expected in the future. In upcoming very high-speed wireless LANs (WLANs), the physical (PHY) layer rate may reach 600 Mbps. To achieve high efficiency at the medium access control (MAC) layer, we identify fundamental properties that must be satisfied by any CSMA-/CA-based MAC layers and develop a novel scheme called aggregation with fragment retransmission (AFR) that exhibits these properties. In the AFR scheme, multiple packets are aggregated into and transmitted in a single large frame. If errors happen during the transmission, only the corrupted fragments of the large frame are retransmitted. An analytic model can be developed to evaluate the throughput and delay performance of AFR over noisy channels and to compare AFR with similar schemes in the literature. Optimal frame and fragment sizes can be calculated using this model. Transmission delays are minimized by using a zero-waiting mechanism where frames are transmitted immediately once the MAC wins a transmission opportunity. We can prove that zero-waiting can achieve maximum throughput.

Proposed Work: We will conduct our experiment under Linux Operating system (ubuntu 11.10) using Network simulator 2. NS (version 2.35) is an object-oriented, discrete event driven network simulator developed at UC Berkley written in C++ and OTcl. NS is used for simulating local and wide area networks. In our simulation, we will consider three queues to maximize the performance of WLAN as well as the utilization of the VoIP and video applications in the network. We will also change some of the simulation parameters such as CWmin, CWmax, and AIFSN in the original IEEE802.11e standard. We will choose IEEE 802.11b PHY layer, and the PHY data rate is set 11 Mbps.

As a complement to the theoretical analysis, we will implement the AFR scheme in the network simulator NS-2. The network topology that we will use is a peer- to-peer one where STA i send packets to STA i + 1. We will report here the simulation results for three types of traffic (TCP,HDTVand VoIP) , all of which follow the requirements of the 802.11n usage model

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