Distributed Fair Scheduling for Wireless Mesh Networks Using IEEE 802.11

Abstract

In IEEE-802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs), unfair bandwidth sharing may arise, because the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance protocol is designed to provide per-station fairness only in one hop. As the hop count from a mobile client to the gateway node increases, the throughput of the node drastically decreases. In this paper, we propose a fair bandwidth allocation scheme for multiradio multichannel WMNs. This scheme provides fair bandwidth sharing among the nodes in a WMN, regardless of their hop distance from the gateway node. To achieve fairness, we first estimate the number of active nodes attached to each router and calculate the effective weights of routers based on the estimation. Then, we differentiate their contention window using their weights. For this method, we derive a multihop packet collision model. The proposed scheme is fully distributed and does not require any global information. Through an extensive simulation study, we show that our scheme ensures per-node fairness without loss of the total aggregate throughput.