A Mechanism Based on Node Cooperation for Improving DCF 0/1 Fairness in Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we focus on the 0/1 fairness problem of the DCF protocol in multi-hop ad hoc network. We find that the DCF protocol can not avoid the carrier interference produced by the interference transmitter to the receiver, when the interference transmitter locates in the collision interference range of the receiver and out of the carrier sensing range of the transmitter. This is the primary cause of the 0/1 fairness problem of the DCF protocol. Furthermore, we propose a node cooperation based 0/1 fairness improving mechanism of the DCF protocol. The simulation results show that this mechanism can greatly improve the fairness of the DCF protocol without significantly impairing aggregate throughput of the network.