Published by license under the OCP Science imprint, a member of the Old City Publishing Group Optimal Packet Size for Network Throughput with Time-Bound Fairness in IEEE 802.11 Networks

With the popularity of IEEE 802.11 networks, it has become increasingly important to analyze the performance of IEEE 802.11 protocols more accurately. The IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol exhibits fairness problem in scenarios with asymmetric topol-ogy. Existing strategies mostly aim at the fairness issue without consider-ing the convergence time to achieve fairness. However, node mobility leads to extensive time-bound communication, such as in delay-tolerant or vehicular networks, where the nodes may communicate in short time scales. In this paper we study how to achieve fairness and at the same time relatively high network throughput when the flows contend in a short time scale. By analyzing the impact of packet size on achieving optimal link throughput and time-bound fairness of the contending flows, we derive the empirical optimal packet size in error-prone wireless channels. Simu-lation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method