Since a radio channel is shared among terminals in an ad hoc network, packet collisions are frequent. In case of transmitting packets especially using TCP, data and ACK packets are transmitted in opposite directions on the same radio channel. Therefore, frequent collisions are unavoidable, and this seriously degrades TCP throughput. It is possible to transmit to two or more nodes which adjoin from a certain node simultaneously on the radio channel. To reduce the likelihood of packet collisions when an intermediate node transmits both data and ACK packets, these two types of packet can be combined and transmitted at the same time to increase the efficiency of radio channel utilization. In this paper, we propose a new technique to improve TCP performance by combining data and ACK packets. Our proposed technique is applicable to generic ad hoc networks easily. By means of a simulation using networks with various topologies, we have found that throughput can be improved by up to 60% by applying our proposed technique.

We propose a new adaptive FEC scheme combined with ELN (Explicit Loss Notification) that was proposed for improving TCP performance in wireless cellular networks. In our method, transmission errors on the wireless link are measured at the packet level and the error status is notified the TCP sender with ELN. According to this information, an appropriate FEC code is determined in order to maximize the TCP performance. We first compare the TCP performance using Snoop Protocol, ELN and the fixed FEC, through which we find the appropriate FEC code against given BER (bit error ratio). We then show how the adaptive FEC can be realized using our solution, and also examine the appropriate observation period of measuring BER enough for the fading speed on the noisy wireless link. We finally demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance than the conventional fixed FEC by using the Gilbert model as a wireless error model.

It is well-known that TCP often experiences severe performance degradation in mobile networks since packet losses not related to network congestion occur frequently due to host mobility. In this paper, we propose a new packet buffering method to address such a problem without the scalability problem in Mobile IP based networks. For this purpose, we first investigate the performance of TCP Tahoe without considering packet buffering through the simulation. Our simulation result shows that in most cases, the smooth handoff by the route optimization extension of Mobile IP standard cannot prevent the degradation of TCP performance due to handoffs, although it is designed to reduce the number of packets dropped during the handoff. It also shows that in utilizing the route optimization extension, the TCP performance sometimes becomes worse even than the case of the base Mobile IP unless its smooth handoff makes less than four packets be dropped during the handoff. Such results mean that at least for TCP, the smooth handoff is not useful unless the route optimization extension supports the buffering method, which makes handoffs be transparent to transport layer protocols by recovering the packets dropped during the handoff. We then investigate the effects of packet buffering on the performance of TCP. We modify the route optimization extension in order to support packet buffering at the base station, but it is a very minor change. Finally, we discuss some problems that should be addressed to recover the packets dropped during the handoff by the buffering method without giving a worse impact on the performance of TCP, and propose our solution to solve those problems.

In the wireless ATM network, the key issue is to guarantee various QoS (Quality of Service) under the conditions of the limited radio link bandwidth and error prone characteristics. In this paper, we show a combination method of the error correction schemes, which is suitable to establish multimedia wireless ATM Networks while keeping an efficient use of the limited bandwidth. We consider two levels of FEC; a bit-level and a cell-level to guarantee cell loss probabilities of real time applications. By combining two levels of FEC, various requirements on cell loss can be met. We then apply the bit-level FEC and ARQ protocol for the data communication; tolerant to the delay characteristics. Through the analytical methods, the required overheads of FECs are examined to satisfy the various QoS requirements of CBR connections. The mean delay analysis for the UBR service class is also presented. In numerical examples, we show how the combination scheme to guarantee various cell loss requirements affects the call blocking probability of the CBR service class and the delay of UBR service class.

In ad hoc wireless networks, wireless terminals can autonomously construct and can maintain the network. They communicate with some neighbor terminals, exchange network information and determine routes for packets on the multi-hop wireless network. Flexible Radio Network (FRN), one of the ad hoc wireless network systems, adopts a proprietary protocol that provides a multiple routes management and a packet retransmission mechanism against packet transmission errors. This system is a commercial product that has been in use in a recent few years. In this paper, we first evaluate the performance through simulations for data-link protocol and routing protocol of the FRN to clarify its basic properties. Furthermore, we propose some techniques that enhance its performance and solve problems on the protocols. We show how they improve the system performance through simulations and analyses.

In CDMA mobile cellular systems, wireless quality is improved by soft handoff techniques. However, it requires to hold multiple channels of cells, which is likely to increase call blocking at wired channels. It is therefore necessary to consider the entire system including the wired and wireless portions of systems for investigating an effectiveness of the soft handoff. In this paper, we also clarify the effect of interference power from mobile stations that are not in the soft handoff because of lack of wired channels. In the analysis, we model three-way soft handoff which has not been considered in past researches. We also show the effect of a call admission control to wireless quality.

Robustness is one of the significant properties in wireless sensor networks because sensor nodes and wireless links are subjected to frequent failures. Once these failures occur, system performance falls into critical condition due to increases in traffic and losses of connectivity and reachability. Most of the existing studies on sensor networks, however, do not conduct quantitative evaluation on robustness and do not discuss what brings in robustness. In this paper, we define and evaluate robustness of wireless sensor networks and show how to improve them. By computer simulation, we show that receiver-initiated MAC protocols are more robust than sender-initiated ones and a simple detour-routing algorithm has more than tripled robustness than the simple minimum-hop routing algorithm.

In this paper, we investigate a call admission control (CAC) problem in a multimedia wireless ATM network that supports various multimedia applications based on micro/pico cellular architectures. Due to reduced wireless cell size (compared to conventional cellular networks), forced termination of calls in progress becomes a more serious problem in the wireless ATM network. Another problem specific to the multimedia wireless network is how to avoid an excessive delay of non-realtime applications under the presence of various realtime applications with priority over non-realtime applications. We consider two service classes; CBR for realtime applications and UBR for non-realtime applications, and then propose a new CAC scheme that addresses above two problems while minimizing a blocking probability of newly arriving calls of CBR. Through the analytical methods, we derive the blocking probabilities and forced termination probabilities of CBR calls and the average packet delay of UBR connections. We also present a method that decides the optimal CAC threshold values in our CAC scheme.

After the popularization of sensor networks, the size of the monitoring region and the number of sensor nodes will grow to an enormous scale. In such large-scale sensor networks, multi-hop communications between sensor nodes will be necessary to cover the whole monitoring region. Moreover, sensor nodes should be grouped into clusters to enhance scalability and robustness. Therefore, we believe that multi-hop communication between clusters is preferable for large-scale sensor networks. To clarify the fundamental characteristics of this form of communication, we analytically derive the network's power consumption and compare it with other routing methods using TDMA communication and an interference-free transmission schedule. The results show multi-hop communication between clusters is preferable in large-scale sensor networks because it can alleviate heavy relaying loads near the sink node and it has a shorter data collection time compared with simple multi-hop communications without clusters. Knowing how much performance degradation arises when interference is unavoidable is essential for multi-hop communications in clustered sensor networks. Therefore, we compare interference-free TDMA communication with CSMA/CA communication which can cause interference in clustered sensor networks. Consequently, we show that although the data collection time is about 3.7 times longer when using CSMA/CA, the power consumption can be suppressed to 12%.