Fairness provisioning in multi-hop wireless backhaul networks: Challenges and solutions

This paper studies the issues of providing fairness over multi-hop wireless backhaul networks. When current MAC protocols are applied, Transit Access Points (TAPs) farther from the gateway may suffer from lower throughput, or even starvation, leading to extremely unfair performance between mobile users. We not only thoroughly discuss this fairness problem, but also highlight the challenges in designing a feasible solution. Moreover, we survey the designs of existing fairness mechanisms, evaluate them via practical issues, and address some open research issues concerning fair resource allocation in wireless backhaul networks. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.