Fairness issues in a chain of IEEE 802.11 stations

: We study a simple general scenario of ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.11 wireless communications, consisting in a chain of transmitters, each of them being in the carrier sense area of its neighbors. Each transmitter always attempts to send some data frames to one receiver in its transmission area, forming a pair sender-receiver. This scenario includes the three pairs fairness problem introduced in [1], and allows to study some fairness issues of the IEEE 802.11 medium access mechanism. We show by simulation that interesting phenomena appear, depending on the number n of pairs in the chain and of its parity. We also point out a notable asymptotic behavior. We introduce a powerful modeling, by simply considering the probability for a transmitter to send data while its neighbors are waiting. This model leads to a non-linear system of equations, which matches very well the simulations, and which allows to study both small and very large chains. We then analyze the fairness issue in th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Bertrand Ducourthial, Yacine Khaled, Stéphane Mottelet
• Keywords: Chain, CORR 2011, Education, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.11 Medium