Approximating Flow-Based Proportional Fairness in Ad-hoc Wireless Networks

This paper presents a distributed flow-based access scheme for slotted-time protocols that approximates proportional-fairness in ad hoc wireless networks and does not have a significant implementation overhead. We say a medium access control algorithm is proportionally fair with respect to individual end-to-end flows in a network, if the product of the end-to-end flow-success probabilities is maximized. The proposed scheme is implemented using a slotted-time protocol - ST-MAC (Singh, 2004). The authors then compare the performance of the ST-MAC protocol with that of the 802.11-MAC using ns2 simulations of random networks of various sizes. For dense-networks, in terms of packet-delivery-ratios and throughput, the ST-MAC protocol presents an improvement over 802.11-MAC, with comparable end-to-end delay.