TCP Fairness Issues in IEEE 802 . 11 Based Access Networks

This paper deals with application level fairness issues in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs. The current implementations of 802.11 use the so called Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) that gives the same medium access priority to all the stations: realizing fairness at the MAC level. Nevertheless, fairness at MAC level may not correspond to fairness at application level, especially in presence of TCP controlled applications operating in an infrastructured network topology, such as an hot-spot. The goal of this paper is twofold: firstly, we investigate the fairness issues experienced by TCP based applications in an infrastructured WLAN; then we propose a rate-control mechanism, which seems appealing for its implementation practicability.