A distributed transmission control method for weighted fairness in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In wireless networks, a medium access control (MAC) protocol is sought to coordinate the transmissions of all nodes for the efficient utilization of the limited channel reception capability. When designing a MAC protocol, fair allocation of bandwidth is an important issue. However, achieving the design goal is difficult, especially for the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, we propose a method that can properly control the transmission probability to reflect the relative weights among data traffic flows for the fair share. A closed-form expression of system throughput is derived for each class in a WLAN and numerically evaluated with different simulation scenarios. The results show that the proposed method can achieve the design goal of weighted fairness under the multi-class environment.