Achieving Weighted Fairness between Uplink and Downlink in IEEE 802.11 WLANs with an Enhanced DCF

Abstract:-Fair allocation of bandwidth and maximization of channel utilization are two important issues when designing a contention-based wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol. It is particularly important in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) because the networks are known to have unfairness problem between uplink and downlink accesses. To solve this problem, we use an enhanced DCF to obtain the optimal transmission probabilities for access point (AP) and wireless stations (STAs) in the sense of weighted fairness and system throughput maximization. The efficiency of the protocol is evaluated with both analysis and simulation. The results show that with the protocol, we can achieve the design goals under different numbers of nodes and different weighted fairness between the accesses in the networks