Joint Fair Resource Allocation for Multi-radio Multi-channel Mesh Networks with Flow Demand Constraint

Maintaining fairness in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is quite important but has been given less attention relative to other aspects such as capacity maximization and maintaining connectivity. IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol has been used as the standard for WMNs although it has been initially designed to operate in wireless local area networks. It is known to be unfair in multi-hop networks. This unfairness is quite evident in bursty conditions which frequently occur in WMNs where subscribers to the same service level must be fairly regarded. However the resource allocation with respect to user fairness and system efficiency in such networks are still remained unspecified. To perform the globally fair bandwidth allocation for all competing traffic flows, in this paper, we tackle the fairness problem in Multi-radio Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks (MR MC-WMNs) and propose a new cross-layer scheme to ensure fairness while maximizing capacity based on traffic demand assurance and link utilization. In the network, some links will be fully used in the solution while the others still have some rest of capacity so we remove the links which are full and the flows on them, we repeat the process until all the capacity is distributed. Through simulation study, we demonstrate that our proposed technique shows remarkable improvement in fairness across flows and eliminates the starvation problem. And also its effects on the network throughput are analyzed.