Abstract-Fair allocation of bandwidth and maximization of channel utilization are two important issues when designing a contention-based wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol. However, achieving both design goals at the same time is very difficult, and has not yet been addressed elsewhere. In this paper, we study this challenging problem, particularly for data communications in IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area networks (WLANs). We propose a priorlty-based fair medium access control (P-MAC) protocol by modifying the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) of the IEEE 802.11 MAC. The key idea is that the coutention window size for each wireless station is properly selected to (1) reflect the relative weighb among data t r d c flows, so as to achieve the weighted fairness; and (2) reflect the number of stations contending for the wireless medium, so as to maximize the aggregate throughput. In P-MAC, our approximations to the optimal contention window sizes, which are based on a theoretical analysis, are evaluated numerically and shown to work well under diNemnt network configurations and traffic ssenarios. Moreover, simulation resultsshnwthat, withfewchsngestotheoriginal DCF,P-MACperforms signifcantly better in terms of both fairness and throughput.
The work in REF deals with fairness and wireless channel utilization, and proposes a scheme for selecting the backoff interval for different traffic classes, based on the classes' weights and the estimated number of stations contending for the wireless channel.
Achieving efficient channel utilization and weighted fairness for data communications in IEEE 802.11 WLAN under the DCF
IEEE 2002 Tenth IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (Cat. No.02EX564)
IEEE 2002 Tenth IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (Cat. No.02EX564)
Computer Science