Throughput Fairness in Infrastructure-Based IEEE 802.11 Mesh Networks

This paper studies throughput fairness among different basic service sets (BSSs) in infrastructure-based IEEE 802.11 mesh networks, where inter-BSS interference is unavoidable because of the difficulty in frequency and coverage planning and the limited number of nonoverlapping frequency channels that are available for IEEE networks. Two approaches are proposed to achieve fair throughput among the cochannel BSSs: 1) dynamic network allocation vectors (DNAVs), which dynamically adjust the cochannel interference by temporarily stopping transmissions in some BSSs using network allocation vectors (NAVs), and 2) forced handoffs (FHO), which force mobile stations to hand off between neighboring BSSs. An optimization problem is formulated as well as a distributed scheme is proposed for each of the approaches for achieving the required throughput fairness while keeping high transmission throughput in the BSSs. Our results show that 1) the DNAV scheme can always achieve the required throughput fairness; 2) the FHO scheme can achieve the required throughput fairness, provided that there is a sufficient overlapping coverage area between BSSs; and 3) the throughput performance of the proposed distributed schemes is very close to the corresponding optimized one.