Fair Coexistence MAC Protocol for Contention-Based Heterogeneous Networks

This paper proposes a contention-based fair coexistence mechanism among heterogeneous networks that have different transmission power and/or coverage. First, we show that the existing carrier sensing multiple access (CSMA) mechanism, that is a prevailing contention-based protocol, results in significant unfairness in channel access when heterogeneous networks coexist; a system with lower transmission power hardly occupies the shared channel due to interference from a system with higher transmission power. We analyze the causes of unfairness in terms of (i) the asymmetry of carrier sensing and (ii) the blindness of binary exponential backoff mechanism and the link adaptation mechanism, and we derive an analytical model of per-system throughput to investigate the effects of these causes. To resolve this problem, we propose a fair coexistence CSMA protocol consisting of access etiquette and interference-aware backoff. The former adaptively controls the contention window size so that the high-power system allows transmission opportunities to the low-power system in a fair and efficient manner. The latter differentiates between the response to transmission failure caused by collision and the response to failure caused by interference. The simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme effectively mitigates the unfairness of channel sharing while attaining high spectral efficiency.

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

[2]  Jing Zhu,et al.  Adapting physical carrier sensing to maximize spatial reuse in 802.11 mesh networks , 2004, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[3]  Nitin H. Vaidya,et al.  A Spatial Backoff Algorithm Using the Joint Control of Carrier Sense Threshold and Transmission Rate , 2007, 2007 4th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks.

[4]  Raj Jain,et al.  A Quantitative Measure Of Fairness And Discrimination For Resource Allocation In Shared Computer Systems , 1998, ArXiv.

[5]  Ramesh R. Rao,et al.  Coexistence mechanisms for interference mitigation between IEEE 802.11 WLANs and Bluetooth , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[6]  A. Stephens,et al.  Wi-Fi (802.11b) and Bluetooth: enabling coexistence , 2001, IEEE Netw..

[7]  Leo Monteban,et al.  WaveLAN®-II: A high-performance wireless LAN for the unlicensed band , 1997, Bell Labs Technical Journal.

[8]  Bernhard Walke,et al.  Unlicensed Operation of IEEE 802.16: Coexistence with 802.11(A) in Shared Frequency Bands , 2006, 2006 IEEE 17th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications.

[9]  Jennifer C. Hou,et al.  Interplay of Spatial Reuse and SINR-Determined Data Rates in CSMA/CA-Based, Multi-Hop, Multi-Rate Wireless Networks , 2007, IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[10]  Hongqiang Zhai,et al.  Physical Carrier Sensing and Spatial Reuse in Multirate and Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[11]  Nada Golmie,et al.  Coexistence in Wireless Networks: Challenges and System-Level Solutions in the Unlicensed Bands , 2006 .

[12]  Hyuk Lim,et al.  Improving spatial reuse through tuning transmit power, carrier sense threshold, and data rate in multihop wireless networks , 2006, MobiCom '06.

[13]  O. Nelles,et al.  An Introduction to Optimization , 1996, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.

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

[15]  Simon Haykin,et al.  An Introduction to Analog and Digital Communications , 1989 .