Achieving Fairness over 802.11 Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol for medium access control in wireless Local Area Networks (LANs) is the de facto standard for wireless ad hoc networks. However, it does not perform well in terms of fairness, delay and throughput specially, in multihop networks. The problem is due to both the MAC and link layer contentions. Many research papers have been published in these fields. Among them, a modification of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol was proposed to achieve per-node fairness, but modifications to the original MAC layer requires a change of hardware, therefore, it is difficult to implement. Moreover, it fails to solve the per-flow unfairness problem. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling method, Probabilistic Control on Round robin Queue (PCRQ) scheduling, aiming to achieve per-flow fairness in multihop ad hoc networks. PCRQ scheduling in the link layer is proposed without modifying IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Our proposed method achieves good performance results in both UDP and TCP traffic. key words: fairness, multihop wireless, PCRQ scheduling, scheduling algorithm