Maximizing throughput-fairness tradeoff in MAC for ad hoc networks

In the last years, there has been an increasing interest in developing and testing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for ad hoc networks based on optimal methods. Several solutions do not take into account the throughput-fairness tradeoff, presenting high throughput performance but under-performing in terms of medium access fairness. This work presents a novel MAC scheme, which is designed to maximize the network throughput-fairness performance. In our scheme, all nodes adopt a common optimal contention window, which is based on a common view of the channel. Our proposal improves the access fairness because the contention window is similar to all nodes, and its behavior does not depend on previous MAC states. Departing from the optimal throughput for a saturated network, we devise a scheme to estimate the number of nodes, which is a prime parameter to regulate the medium access control. We show that each node is suitable to estimate the number of competing nodes by using both its own medium access probability and the idle slot probability observed from the channel. Several simulation results evaluate the throughput-fairness performance of our proposal with several state-of-the-art MAC protocols, such as AOB, Idle Sense, GDCF and the well known IEEE 802.11. The results indicate that our approach presents the highest value of medium access fairness among the simulated protocols, meaning that its throughput is closer to the optimal theoretical throughput obtained for a fair network.