Optimal Channel-Switching Strategies in Multi-Channel Wireless Networks
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Optimal Channel-Switching Strategies in Multi-channel Wireless Networks by Qingsi Wang A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Electrical Engineering: Systems) in The University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Mingyan Liu, Chair Assistant Professor Jacob Abernethy Associate Professor Achilleas Anastasopoulos Professor Demosthenis Teneketzis c Qingsi Wang 2014 All Rights Reserved To my parents and grandparents ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor Professor Mingyan Liu, who offered me the great opportunity to become a Wolverine and guided me through years of study and work, as an excellent mentor and friend. I would also like to thank all my committee members, Professors Demosthenis Teneketzis, Achilleas Anastasopoulos and Jacob Abernethy, who have also given me so many enlightening lectures with so much intellectual fun, which is one of the most important parts of my graduate education. I am also thankful to all my friends in Ann Arbor and in China, for the million times of chatting on random topics, for all the Chinese and exotic food we shared, for the “tons of damage” we dealt in the League of Legends, for all the sweet bitter time in life we spent together. I definitely want to thank the lovely town Ann Arbor. The suffering piles of snows in the depressing winters make the warmth from the culture, the people, and the green summer sunshine of this city feel more precious and adorable than any other places I have visited, and I am glad I have left a five-year mark along the dimension of time on this spatial spot, in a universe that I will often revisit in my heart. Last but not least, I am grateful to my parents and grandparents for their eternal support and encouragement. I am regretful for years of lack of verbal communication with them but I always know that all the conquering of hardship in these years would mean, without their love, nothing. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION .................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................... iii LIST OF FIGURES ............................... vii LIST OF TABLES ................................ viii LIST OF APPENDICES ............................ ix ABSTRACT ................................... x CHAPTER I. Introduction .............................. 1 1.1 MotivationandOverview .................... 1 1.2 LiteratureReview ........................ 2 1.3 Organization and Main Contributions . 6 1.4 NotationConvention....................... 8 II. Optimal Channel Switching as Jamming Defense - Part I: Against a No-Regret Learning Attacker ............. 10 2.1 ProblemFormulation ...................... 10 2.2 Optimal Channel Switching against a No-Regret Learning At- tacker............................... 12 2.2.1 Against Adaptive Attack with Known Patterns . 13 2.2.2 Against Adaptive Attack with Unknown Patterns . 17 2.3 TheDecoyDilemma....................... 18 2.4 ConcludingRemarks....................... 20 III. Optimal Channel Switching as Jamming Defense - Part II: Against a Resource-Replenishing Attacker with Minimax Op- timality ................................. 22 iv 3.1 Problem Formulation and Preliminaries . 23 3.2 Channel Switching for Minimax Optimality . 30 3.2.1 Basic Characterization . 31 3.2.2 Characterization with Structure on the Replenishment 35 3.2.3 Asymptotics ...................... 37 3.3 ConcludingRemarks....................... 38 3.3.1 Non-negative Mˆ .................... 39 3.3.2 Conversion to a Gain Formulation . 40 IV. Throughput Optimal Channel Switching in Random Access - Part I: Intuition from Slotted Aloha .............. 41 4.1 Preliminaries . 42 4.1.1 Slotted Aloha and IEEE 802.11 DCF . 42 4.1.2 Stability and Throughput Optimality . 43 4.2 Decentralized Throughput Optimal Switching via Individual Learning ............................. 44 4.2.1 Centralized throughput optimal policy . 45 4.2.2 Decentralized implementation via individual learning 47 4.3 Concluding Remarks: Hope and Challenge . 53 V. Throughput Optimal Channel Switching in Random Access - Part II: IEEE 802.11 WLANs .................. 55 5.1 802.11DCFBackoffMechanism . 55 5.2 ProblemFormulation ...................... 56 5.3 Single Channel Stability Region . 62 5.3.1 The Stability Region Equation Σ . 62 5.3.2 Characterizing the Solutions to Σ . 64 5.4 Numerical Results: Single Channel . 66 5.4.1 Multi-equilibrium and Discontinuity in ρ ...... 66 5.4.2 Numerical and Empirical Stability Regions . 69 5.4.3 Discussion: From 802.11 DCF Back to Aloha . 72 5.5 Multi-channel Analysis . 74 5.6 Applicability and Implementation of Unbiased Policies in Both Symmetric and Asymmetric Systems . 80 5.6.1 Unbiased Policies . 80 5.6.2 Practical Implementation of Throughput Optimal Un- biased Policies: Symmetric Channels . 81 5.6.3 Practical Implementation of Throughput Optimal Un- biased Policies: Asymmetric Channels . 83 5.6.4 Fairness under Throughput Optimal Policies . 86 5.7 Signal Quality plus Congestion Level in Channel Selection . 87 v VI. Conclusion and Future Work .................... 91 6.1 SummaryofMainContributions . 91 6.2 FutureWork ........................... 92 APPENDICES .................................. 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................ 112 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 The change of policy in the two-channel scenario. 17 5.1 Solution components for various scenarios: an illustration. 67 5.2 The stability regions in various scenarios - part I. 70 5.3 The stability regions in various scenarios - part II. 72 5.4 The stability region of slotted ALOHA and induced subsets. 73 5.5 The stability region of two-channel 802.11 DCF under the equi-occupancy policy. .................................. 79 5.6 Throughput optimality of equi-occupancy distribution. 79 5.7 The intersection of simulated stability region with the plane of arrival ratesofthetwonodesunderinspection.. 84 5.8 Histogram of node population in the slower channel: (a) SAC ((b) ℓ SAS) with αℓ =0.5; (c) SAC ((d) SAS) with αℓ = m . ........ 86 5.9 Congestion-based vs. signal-based: stability region. 89 C.1 Slottedtimedynamics. ......................... 105 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 TheHedgealgorithm........................... 14 5.1 Congestion-based vs. signal-based: node distribution. .. 90 C.1 Specifications of the implementation of test bench. 108 viii LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix A. SupplementstoChapterII ........................ 95 B. SupplementstoChapterIII. .. .. 98 C. SupplementstoChapterV . .. .. 103 D. GlossaryofNotation............................ 109 ix ABSTRACT Optimal Channel-Switching Strategies in Multi-channel Wireless Networks by Qingsi Wang Chair: Professor Mingyan Liu The dual nature of scarcity and under-utilization of spectrum resources, as well as recent advances in software-defined radio, led to extensive study on the design of transceivers that are capable of opportunistic channel access. By allowing users to dynamically select which channel(s) to use for transmission, the overall throughput performance and the spectrum utilization of the system can in general be improved, compared to one with a single channel or more static channel allocations. The rea- son for such improvement lies in the exploitation of the underlying temporal, spa- tial, spectral and congestion diversity. In this dissertation, we focus on the channel- switching/hopping decision of a (group of) legitimate user(s) in a multi-channel wire- less communication system, and study three closely related problems: 1) a jamming defense problem against a no-regret learning attacker, 2) a jamming defense problem with minimax (worst-case) optimal channel-switching strategies, and 3) the through- put optimal strategies for a group of competing users in IEEE 802.11-like medium access schemes. For the first problem we study the interaction between a user and an attacker from a learning perspective, where an online learner naturally adapts to the available x information on the adversarial environment over time, and evolves its strategy with certain payoff guarantee. We show how the user can counter a strong learning at- tacker with knowledge on its learning rationale, and how the learning technique can itself be considered as a countermeasure with no such prior information. We further consider in the second problem the worst-case optimal strategy for the user without prior information on the attacking pattern, except that the attacker is subject to a resource constraint, which models its energy consumption and replenishment process. We provide explicit characterization for the optimal strategies and show the most damaging attacker, interestingly, behaves randomly in an i.i.d. fashion. In the last problem, we consider a group of competing users in a non-adversarial setting. We place the interaction among users in the context of IEEE 802.11-like medium access schemes, and derive decentralized channel allocation for overall throughput improve- ment. We show the typically rule-of-thumb load balancing principle in spectrum resource sharing can be indeed throughput optimal. xi CHAPTER I Introduction 1.1 Motivation and Overview Advances in software-defined radio in recent years have motivated numerous stud- ies on building agile, channel-aware transceivers that are capable of sensing instan- taneous channel quality [1, 2, 3]. With this opportunity comes the challenge of mak- ing effective opportunistic channel access and transmission scheduling decisions, as well as designing supporting system architectures. In this research,