TY - JOUR TI - Implicit coordination techniques for wireless communications DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3736PV2 PY - 2012 AB - In distributed networks with a large number of network nodes, direct coordination of communication nodes for performance optimization is an inefficient and difficult task that demands global knowledge of the network status. Hence, implicit coordination techniques, that indirectly infers the network status from the delay and loss of the packets that are received, transmitted, or overheard, have been developed for network performance improvement. Implicit coordination can be accomplished while preserving the valuable network bandwidth resource that can be easily exhausted during the coordination processes. Well-designed implicit coordination techniques, such as TCP in IP protocols or CSMA in 802.11 systems, can make the communication system more efficient and reliable by eliminating or reducing overheads and latency for coordination. In this paper, implicit coordination techniques are designed and implemented for a number of practical cooperative communication protocols in wireless networks. Firstly, an implicit coordination technique is applied for vehicular networks where adaptability and scalability are major concerns owing to dynamically varying network conditions. For efficient and reliable dissemination of life-safety messages, packet relay nodes are implicitly coordinated for their cooperative relay of the packets received. Next, a joint power control and scheduling problem is discussed in wireless peer-to-peer to networks. Implicit coordination technique is applied to solve complicated resource allocation problems. The resulting coordination algorithm is fully distributed and improves both throughput efficiency and user fairness to the network, relying only on the local information of individual nodes. Lastly, implicit coordination techniques are used to protect the location privacy of the wireless nodes that are collaborating for their location privacy. Two novel cooperative location privacy protection methods, Location Cloaking and Location Cloning, are designed in the communication physical layer. Then, implicit coordination techniques are applied to protect the location privacy of cooperator nodes whose location information may be threatened while cooperating with another node. Implicit coordination also minimizes the risks caused from extra packet transmissions during cooperative operations. KW - Electrical and Computer Engineering KW - Wireless communication systems--Security measures KW - Computer network protocols LA - eng ER -