This brief investigates distributed medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. For WLANs, an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm are presented to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition, a novel token-based scheduling scheme is proposed to provide great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management. Also proposed is a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme.

With the rapid growth of multimedia applications and the advances of wireless communication technologies, quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services in heterogeneous wireless networks has been an important issue and drawn much attention from both academia and industry. Due to the hostile transmission environment and limited radio resources, QoS provisioning in wireless networks is much more complex and difficult than in its wired counterpart. Moreover, due to the lack of central controller in the networks, distributed network control is required, adding complexity to QoS provisioning. In this thesis, medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning is investigated for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. Originally designed for high-rate data traffic, a WLAN has limited capability to support delay-sensitive voice traffic, and the service for voice traffic may be impacted by data traffic load, resulting in delay violation or large delay variance. Aiming at addressing these limitations, we propose an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition to supporting voice traffic, providing better services for data traffic in WLANs is another focus of our research.

Wireless technologies and applications are becoming one of the fastest growing and most promising areas in recent years. To accommodate data transmission by multiple stations sharing the scarce wireless bandwidth, a medium access control (MAC) protocol plays a crucial role in scheduling packet transmission fairly and efficiently. The emerging wireless networks, such as ad-hoc networks, sensor networks or mesh networks, are mostly multi-hop based and in distributed manner, which brings a lot of problems and challenges in designing fine-tuned MAC protocols tailored for modern wireless network. In this book, the authors give complete and in-depth overviews to the classic medium access control algorithms and the related protocols, as well as their applications in various wireless data networks especially the most successful Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). The book consists of three major parts. Part I of this book, including Chapters 1-7, is emphasising on the fundamentals of medium access control algorithms and protocols. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the wireless networks, such as overview of wireless networks, problems and challenges of the wireless networks, and the classifications of MAC protocols as well as the performance metrics. Chapter 2 introduces important collision resolution algorithms applied in medium access controls, for example, the splitting algorithm and the backoff algorithm. Chapter 3 reviews the hybrid access control algorithms that combine both contention and allocation schemes. A series of important collision avoidance schemes are introduced in Chapters 4-7 respectively, with a specific design goal covered in each chapter. Chapter 4 focuses on the multi-channel MAC protocols for collision avoidance; Chapter 5 introduces the concepts of power control and power management in medium access control and how they can be applied in MAC protocol design; Chapter 6 presents how to provide Quality-of- Service (QoS) to multimedia wireless networks, in either centralised or distributed manner; and Chapter 7 explains how the smart antennas can be applied in the medium access control to provide high channel throughput and low packet collision.

Focusing on an important and complicated topic in wireless network design, Wireless Quality of Service: Techniques, Standards, and Applications systematically addresses the quality-of-service (QoS) issues found in many types of popular wireless networks. In each chapter, the book presents numerous QoS challenges encountered in real-world

[Author's abstract] Short term fairness, low delay jitter and high throughput are required to provide differentiated Quality of Service (QoS) levels in wireless ad hoc networks and wireless Local Area Networks (LAN). This thesis presents a study of differentiated service mechanism via Cooperative Medium Access Protocol in wireless LANs. The IEEE 802.11 MAC can provide service differentiation via Point Coordination Function (PCF) by polling or Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) by Static Priority (SP) and Dynamic Priority (DP). The DP and PCF in highly loaded networks and SP in lightly loaded networks perform poorly and can not support QoS levels of wireless LANs efficiently. This thesis proposes a novel and efficient differentiated service mechanism via Cooperative Medium Access Control (C MAC). Proposed mechanism performs very well under both cases, highly loaded and lightly loaded. It protects high priority classes from greedy sources while providing short term fairness within the priority classes and high network goodput. However, it encounters a small amount of additional packet loss and goodput degradation and it requires additional counter, Backoff Increment Counter, and additional knowledge, priority level of the transmitted packet.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are dynamically self-organized and self-configured, where the nodes in the network automatically establish an ad hoc network and maintain mesh connectivity. These properties make WMNs a key technology for next generation wireless networking. However, supporting Quality of Service (QoS) to enable multimedia services is still one of the major issues in next-generation WMNs. In distributed systems like WMNs, the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is considered very important in the IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks, as it supports many crucial operational functions. Hence, QoS support in WMNs can be enhanced through the efficient cross-layer design of MAC protocols that utilizes advanced physical layer technologies viz Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) with its multiple spatial channels that are capable of simultaneous receive or transmit streams. MIMO has become a very attractive technology in providing support for different QoS requirements. In this thesis we propose a novel QoS MIMO-aware MAC Protocol (QMMP). QMMP is a MAC protocol framework that exploits the MIMO system gains to boost QoS support. The proposed MAC framework includes the following components. The first component enables concurrent sharing of the increased MIMO bandwidth, i.e., instead of allocating all the spatial channels to one connection, connections can concurrently share the increase bandwidth via splitting the spatial channels. The second component reduces the medium access collisions problem. In distributed systems like WMNs, medium access collisions have a noticeably negative impact on resource (bandwidth) utilization as they leave the bandwidth unutilized for a long time. To address this problem, we propose a spatial channels sharing scheme during medium contention period. The third component boosts the bandwidth utilization during data transmission. We propose resource management schemes that adapt the physical data rate and the aggregation frame length according to the instantaneous channel quality. Then we propose a QoS-aware bandwidth provisioning mechanism that performs effective bandwidth distribution to further boost QoS support.

This book provides a systematic introduction to the fundamental concepts, major challenges, and effective solutions for Quality of Service in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Unlike other books on the topic, it focuses on the networking aspects of WSNs, discussing the most important networking issues, including network architecture design, medium access control, routing and data dissemination, node clustering, node localization, query processing, data aggregation, transport and quality of service, time synchronization, and network security. Featuring contributions from researchers, this book strikes a balance between fundamental concepts and new technologies, providing readers with unprecedented insights into WSNs from a networking perspective. It is essential reading for a broad audience, including academics, research engineers, and practitioners, particularly postgraduate/postdoctoral researchers and engineers in industry. It is also suitable as a textbook or supplementary reading for graduate computer engineering and computer science courses.