Data networks
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Congestion avoidance and control
SIGCOMM '88 Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols
MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN's
SIGCOMM '94 Proceedings of the conference on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
Analysis of Backoff Protocols for Mulitiple AccessChannels
SIAM Journal on Computing
Balanced media access methods for wireless networks
MobiCom '98 Proceedings of the 4th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Reversing the collision-avoidance handshake in wireless networks
MobiCom '99 Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Achieving MAC layer fairness in wireless packet networks
MobiCom '00 Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Distributed fair scheduling in a wireless LAN
MobiCom '00 Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
MobiHoc '01 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking & computing
Performance evaluation of a fair backoff algorithm for IEEE 802.11 DFWMAC
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking & computing
Ordered packet scheduling in wireless ad hoc networks: mechanisms and performance analysis
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking & computing
LCN '03 Proceedings of the 28th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks
Wireless medium access control protocols
IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
Quality-of-service in ad hoc carrier sense multiple access wireless networks
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Enhancing fairness in wireless multi-hop networks
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile multimedia communications
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It is an undisputed fact that fairness is an important element of a well-designed medium access control (MAC) protocol for multi-hop ad hoc networks. However, most popular MAC protocols still fail to attain an acceptable level of fairness in media access although several enhancements have been proposed in the past. These proposed enhancements are effective only in limited scenarios. It is our objective in this paper to do the following: (i) analyze the fairness problem; (ii) identify and analyze the three main causes leading to the fairness problem, namely, the lack of synchronization problem (LSP), the double contention areas problem (DCP) and the lack of coordination problem (LCP); (iii) based on the analysis, propose a new MAC protocol named the extended hybrid asynchronous time division multiple access (EHATDMA) as a solution. For better assessment of fairness, we have designed an index named max-min fairness index, which is scenario-independent and reflects the difference between the fair sharing provided by a protocol and the ideal max-min fair sharing. Comprehensive simulations have been carried out to compare the fairness of our protocol with the existing ones. Simulation results show that although the existing protocols employ various enhancements meant to improve the fairness property, most of them are still strongly biased towards throughput when a conflict between throughput and fairness arises. In addition, the fairness performance of these protocols varies widely from one scenario to another. On the other hand, EHATDMA strikes a good balance between throughput and fairness. It delivers a consistently high level of fairness regardless of network topology, traffic load and radio parameters, yet maintains high throughput whenever possible. Our simulation results also reveal that the most important mechanism affecting the fair sharing of radio channels among flows is the non-work-conserving mechanism.