Fairness Issues in a Wireless LAN

Vaggala Navyatha, E. Sunil Reddy

Abstract: Fairness is an important issue when we access a shared wireless channel. Using fair scheduling, it is possible to allocate the bandwidth in proportion to weights of the packet flows sharing the channel. This paper presents fully distributed algorithm for fair scheduling in a wireless LAN and also implements the algorithm using a centralized coordinator to arbitrate medium access. The proposed algorithm is able to transmit the allocated bandwidth to different flows which is proportional to their weights. One of the advantage features of proposed approach is that we can implement it with simple modifications to the IEEE 802.11 standard.

Keywords: MAC Medium Access Control, wireless networks, weighted fairness, distributed protocols