Fairness Improvement on the Distributed Coordination Function of IEEE 802.11 Networks

Abstract

It has been known that using IEEE 802.11 as the link layer protocol in ad hoc networks causes serious performance and fairness problems. In this paper, we propose an improved coordination mechanism to handle the fairness problems by asking each wireless device to maintain a neighbor list. Each device can determine when it should transmit or receive a frame by first probing if any neighbor wishes to transmit, then trying to share the bandwidth evenly with the neighbors. We compare our mechanism with IEEE 802.11 using ns-2 to show that all the fairness issues in these known topologies can be improved at the cost of slight drop in the total throughput.