On the buffer occupancy of an IEEE 802.11 station in a hot-spot
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
COMSNETS'09 Proceedings of the First international conference on COMmunication Systems And NETworks
Adaptive wireless bandwidth allocation for per-station fairness
ISCIT'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Communications and information technologies
Achieving single channel, full duplex wireless communication
Proceedings of the sixteenth annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Per-station throughput fairness in a WLAN hot-spot with TCP traffic
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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In this paper, we study the problem of maintaining fairness for TCP connections in wireless local area networks (WLANs) based upon the IEEE 802.11 standard. Current implementations of 802.11 use the so-called distributed coordination function (DCF), which provides similar medium access priority to all stations. Although this mode of operation ensures fair access to the medium at the MAC level, it does not provide any provisions for ensuring fairness among the TCP connections. TCP unfairness may result in significant degradation of performance leading to users perceiving unsatisfactory quality of service. We propose and analyze two solutions that are capable of enabling TCP fairness with minimal additional complexity. The proposed solutions are based on utilizing a rate-control mechanism in two modes: static or adaptive. They do not require modifying existing standards at the MAC or network layers. Hence, they are fully compatible with existing devices. Our performance analysis results prove the efficaciousness of our proposed solutions in achieving TCP fairness compared to existing approaches. We have, also, implemented the proposed solutions in an ad-hoc experimental test-bed, and performed measurements to demonstrate the validity of our approach and results