In a dense wireless network, concurrent transmissions normally increase interference and reduce network performance. In such an environment, however, there is a possibility that a frame can be decoded correctly if its receive power is higher than that of another frame by some predefined value (i.e., the so-called capture effect). As a result, the unfairness of throughputs among network nodes likely occurs in that context. This research aims to quantify the throughput performance of only one access point Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) with dense network nodes in the presence of the capture effect. We first propose a new analytical model, which can express not only WLANs' throughputs but also WLANs' unfairness transmission. The validity of the proposed model is confirmed by simulation results. Second, relying on the model, we present a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol-based solution, which realizes throughput fairness between network nodes induced by the capture effect.

A Multipath TCP (MPTCP) connection uses multiple subflows (i.e., TCP flows), each of which traverses over a wireless link, enabling throughput and resilience enhancements in mobile wireless networks. However, to achieve the benefits, the subflows are necessarily initialized (i.e., must complete TCP handshakes) and sequentially attached to the MPTCP connection. In the standard (MPTCPST), MPTCP initialization raises several problems. First, the TCP handshake of opening subflow is generally associated with a predetermined network. That leads to degraded MPTCP performance when the network does not have the lowest latency among available ones. Second, the first subflow's initialization needs to be successful before the next subflow can commence its attempt to achieve initialization. Therefore, the resilience of multiple paths fails when the first initialization fails. This paper proposes a novel method for MPTCP initialization, namely MPTCPSD (i.e., MPTCP with SYN duplication), which can solve the problems. MPTCPSD duplicates the first SYN and attempts to establish TCP handshakes for all subflows simultaneously, hence inherently improves the loss-resiliency. The subflow that achieves initialization first, is selected as the first subflow, consequently solving the first problem. We have implemented and extensively evaluated MPTCPSD in comparison to MPTCPST. In an emulated network, the evaluation results show that MPTCPSD has better performance that MPTCPST with the scenarios of medium and short flows. Moreover, MPTCPSD outperforms MPTCPST in the case that the opening subflow fails. Moreover, a real network evaluation proves that MPTCPSD efficiently selects the lowest delay network among three ones for the first subflow regardless of the preconfigured default network. Additionally, we propose and implement a security feature for MPTCPSD, that prevents the malicious subflow from being established by a third party.

Wireless sensor network MAC protocols switch radios off periodically, employing the so-called duty cycle mechanism, in order to conserve battery power that would otherwise be wasted by energy-costly idle listening. In order to minimize the various negative side-effects of the original scheme, especially on latency and throughput, various improvements have been proposed. In this paper, we introduce a new MAC protocol called MAC2(Multi-hop Adaptive with packet Concatenation-MAC) which combines three promising techniques into one protocol. Firstly, the idea to forward packets over multiple hops within one operational cycle as initially introduced in RMAC. Secondly, an adaptive method that adjusts the listening period according to traffic load minimizing idle listening. Thirdly, a packet concatenation scheme that not only increases throughput but also reduces power consumption that would otherwise be incurred by additional control packets. Furthermore, MAC2 incorporates the idea of scheduling data transmissions with minimum latency, thereby performing packet concatenation together with the multi-hop transmission mechanism in a most efficient way. We evaluated MAC2 using the prominent network simulator ns-2 and the results show that our protocol can outperform DW-MAC – a state of the art protocol both in terms of energy efficiency and throughput.

This letter presents a 900 MHz ZigBee RF transmitter front-end with on-chip LO suppression circuit at the output. To suppress the LO leakage at the RF output, a novel LO suppression circuit is adopted at the up-conversion mixer. The RF transmitter implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS shows more than 28 dB of LO suppression over a wide range of the baseband signal power variation.

This paper presents a design method of a two-hop wireless power transfer (WPT) system for installing on a robot arm. The class-E inverter and the class-D rectifier are used on the transmission and receiving sides, respectively, in the proposed WPT system. Analytical equations for the proposed WPT system are derived as functions of the geometrical and physical parameters of the coils, such as the outer diameter and height of the coils, winding-wire diameter, and number of turns. Using the analytical equations, we can optimize the WPT system to obtain the design values with the theoretically highest power-delivery efficiency under the size limitation of the robot arm. The circuit experiments are in quantitative agreement with the theoretical predictions obtained from the analysis, indicating the validity of the analysis and design method. The experimental prototype achieved 83.6% power-delivery efficiency at 6.78MHz operating frequency and 39.3W output power.