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Wireless Technology

  • Wireless links, in contrast to wired
    • Wireless are far more crowded
    • Work for battery constraint
    • Mobile support
  • SNR: Signal-to-Noise ratio
    • SNR = 10*log(|S|/|N|)
    • Larger SNR -> easier to extract signal from noise (good)
  • Wireless BER (bit error rates)
    • Higher than in wired networks
    • Errors often occur in bursts
    • Variers over time of connection
  • Hidden terminal problem
    • Imagine you have 3 devices: A, B, and C.
    • A & B can hear each other, B & C can hear each other
    • A & C cannot hear eachother, meaning A & C are unaware of their interference at B
  • Riddle me this: As a mobile node gets farther and farther away from a base station, how can we ensure that loss probability doesn't spike?
    1) Increase transmission power
    - Lots more battery consumption and increased radiation
    2) Reducing transmission rate
    - Introducing FEC (decreases good throughput, other physical layer reasons)

Wireless MAC

CDMA (Physical Layer Protocol)

  • Uses spread spectrum technology, to signal spread over frequencies
    • Highly resistant to interference
    • Supports large number of users
    • FHSS (Frequency hoping spread spectrum)
    • DSSS (Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum)
    • CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)

802.111 CSMA/CA

  • CA: Backoff + ACK mechanism
  • No CD, because wireless nodes can't transmit and listen at the same time
  • Missing ACK is the only indicator of interference
  • 802.111 uses Stop-and-wait
  • Modern 802.111 bundles multiple frames
    • Block ACK, bitmap-based, not cumulative, each bit on bitmap indicates success/failure of a specific frame
    • Sender only retransmits missing frames, and then a BlockAck Request
    • Receiver sends one Block ACK containing the bitmap