MAC layer fairness in IEEE 802.11 DCF based Wireless Mesh Networks

Fairness provisioning in IEEE 802.11 DCF based Wireless Mesh Networks is a very challenging task due to unfair nature of 802.11 DCF based MAC protocol. In this paper, notion of proportional fairness is used in WMN where each node gets channel share proportional to their load. A load estimation strategy is proposed at each WMN node, which in turn estimates required channel share for every node. A probabilistic approach is used to tune the contention window based on the difference between actual channel share and required channel share. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme works better than the standard IEEE 802.11 based DCF MAC in terms of fairness and throughput.