Fairness Aware Rate Adaptation and Proportional Scheduling for IEEE 802.11 WLANs Using FSE

With its rapid development in the wireless markets, IEEE 802.11 WLAN is experiencing a huge popularity. However, due to the limitation of frequency bandwidth of WLANs, it is essential that the available radio resource should be fully utilized to offer different services to multiple users. In order to maximize system throughput while still guaranteeing the fairness among users, a proportional fairness based algorithm is proposed in this work. Since most of the previous resource allocation algorithms were simply based on the channel conditions without taking into account user's demand, in this paper, we introduce the theory of fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) which also allows us to consider user's demand as an important factor. As such, the fairness among users can be improved based on different users' requirements for services. In addition, a channel state information based rate adaptation scheme is also proposed. Through simulation studies, the results clearly validate that our proposed scheme shows advantages on providing user fairness while still improving the system throughput.