Proportional fair throughput allocation in multirate IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

Under heterogeneous radio conditions, Wireless LAN stations may use different modulation schemes, leading to a heterogeneity of bit rates. In such a situation, 802.11 DCF allocates the same throughput to all stations independently of their transmitting bit rate; as a result, the channel is used by low bit rate stations most of the time, and efficiency is low. In this paper, we propose a more efficient throughput allocation criterion based on proportional fairness. We find out that, in a proportional fair allocation, the same share of channel time is given to high and low bit rate stations, and, as a result, high bit rate stations obtain more throughput. We propose two schemes of the upcoming 802.11e standard to achieve this allocation, and compare their delay and throughput performance.

[1]  Marco Conti,et al.  Dynamic tuning of the IEEE 802.11 protocol to achieve a theoretical throughput limit , 2000, TNET.

[2]  Ieee . Wg.  Part11 : Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications, Higher-Speed Physical Layer Extension in the 2.4 GHz Band , 1999 .

[3]  Thierry Turletti,et al.  Performance analysis under finite load and improvements for multirate 802.11 , 2005, Comput. Commun..

[4]  Frank Kelly,et al.  Charging and rate control for elastic traffic , 1997, Eur. Trans. Telecommun..

[5]  A. M. Abdullah,et al.  Wireless lan medium access control (mac) and physical layer (phy) specifications , 1997 .

[6]  Sunghyun Choi,et al.  Performance enhancement of multirate IEEE 802.11 WLANs with geographically scattered stations , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[7]  Ilenia Tinnirello,et al.  Kalman filter estimation of the number of competing terminals in an IEEE 802.11 network , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[8]  Laurent Massoulié,et al.  Bandwidth sharing and admission control for elastic traffic , 2000, Telecommun. Syst..

[9]  M. Radimirsch,et al.  Assured and expedited forwarding extensions for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN , 2002, IEEE 2002 Tenth IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Service (Cat. No.02EX564).

[10]  John V. Guttag,et al.  Time-based Fairness Improves Performance in Multi-Rate WLANs , 2004, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track.

[11]  Qian Zhang,et al.  Distributed MAC adaptation for WLAN QoS differentiation , 2003, GLOBECOM '03. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37489).

[12]  Vaduvur Bharghavan,et al.  Achieving MAC layer fairness in wireless packet networks , 2000, MobiCom '00.

[13]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Rate adaptation, Congestion Control and Fairness: A Tutorial , 2000 .

[14]  Luca Vollero,et al.  A delay model for IEEE 802.11e EDCA , 2005, IEEE Communications Letters.

[15]  Albert Banchs,et al.  Distributed weighted fair queuing in 802.11 wireless LAN , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Conference on Communications. Conference Proceedings. ICC 2002 (Cat. No.02CH37333).

[16]  Albert Banchs,et al.  Providing throughput guarantees in IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN , 2002, 2002 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Record. WCNC 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8609).

[17]  A. Girotra,et al.  Performance Analysis of the IEEE 802 . 11 Distributed Coordination Function , 2005 .

[18]  Martin Heusse,et al.  Performance anomaly of 802.11b , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[19]  Thierry Turletti,et al.  Adaptive EDCF: enhanced service differentiation for IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks , 2003, 2003 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, 2003. WCNC 2003..

[20]  Frank Kelly,et al.  Rate control for communication networks: shadow prices, proportional fairness and stability , 1998, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[21]  Kazutomo Kobayashi,et al.  On the throughput of an IEEE802.11a Wireless LAN system with terminals under heterogeneus radio conditions , 2003 .