Improvement of throughput fairness in IEEE 802.11 based WLANs using successive interference cancellation

In this paper, we study the throughput fairness performance in IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLANs) without and with successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique. We consider a single rate WLAN with carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol for MAC layer and a SIC technique at the physical layer. We determine the throughputs of the users in IEEE 802.11 WLANs without and with SIC technique via simulation and then calculate the fairness index. Through extensive simulation results, we demonstrate that SIC technique not only significantly increases throughput in WLANs but also throughput fairness. However, the improvement of fairness index for enabling SIC technique is higher at a low transmit power and it decreases with increasing the transmit power of the users. We also obtain that for a WLAN with SIC technique the variation of fairness index with transmission power is very low.