| dc.description.abstract | The field of wireless communication is changing rapidly, with increasing numbers
of wireless applications being touted as everyday staples in the future. Some examples
of these applications include Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet Of
Things (IoT), tactile internet, smart power grids, unmanned traffic management systems,
remote medical procedures, disaster network deployment, sensor networks, and cloud
computing, to name just a few. However, for many of these applications to fulfill their
stated potential, the required system performance that wireless networks need to have cannot
be achieved with current deployments. One of the major factors in the performance of
wireless networks is the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer.
TheMAC layer serves as the junction between the Physical (PHY) and Network (NET)
layers, and its efficiency is key to the performance of communication networks. This is
especially critical for wireless networks, since wireless transmissions introduce interference
into the system which can be detrimental to the performance of wireless networks.
While the MAC layer consists of both software and hardware components, researchers
overwhelmingly only perform computer simulations to verify the performance of their
protocols, leaving the potential impact of hardware on the performance largely untested.
Unlike the Physical (PHY) and Network (NET) layers, there is little experimental verification
of the performance of novel protocols suggested for the MAC layer. Hence, protocols
developed for the MAC layer do not get verified at a level commensurate with the claims
of the protocols, thus generating no momentum to drive the adoption of new protocols.
The end result is that the protocols in current use are little more than variants of the original
ALOHA protocol proposed in 1970. So motivated, in this dissertation, I present a
platform for implementation and experimentation of next-generation wireless MAC protocols,
along with a novel architecture that uses a hardware-software decoupling principle
to achieve flexibility without loss in performance and show how these platforms can aid
prototyping of MAC protocols in the future. In addition to that, I will also present a MAC
protocol for mmWave networks that can be implemented directly on the IEEE 802.11ad
standards. | en |
