A fair MAC scheme for EDCA based wireless networks

This paper presents a bandwidth occupied time proportion fair MAC algorithm (BOTP-FMAC) for WLAN and wireless mesh network (WMN). It aims to address the unfairness problem in enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) mechanism, in which higher-priority streaming traffic flows intend to severely deprive the access opportunity of lower-priority traffic flows due to the capture effect, especially when the network load is near saturation. By dynamically tuning the parameters of channel contention and the threshold of bandwidth occupied time proportion for priority queue adaptively, BOTP-FMAC algorithm can achieve a weighted fair allocation of the bandwidth resource among different traffic flows. The simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm substantially improves the fairness and attains a greater aggregate throughput. Additionally, it is easy to carry out without generating network overhead.