Fair Media Access for Wireless LANs

This paper addresses load balancing algorithms for the wireless links to solve the fairness problem, where stations are not able to gain access equally to the shared wireless medium according to the current medium access control protocols. The fairness problem occurs mostly because of the existence of hidden stations and the presumption of a non-fully connected wireless network topology. In this paper, p ij -persistent carrier sense multiple access based algorithms are proposed in which a fair wireless access for each user is accomplished using a pre-calculated link access probability. Link access probabilities are calculated at the source station in two ways using connection-based and time-based media access methods. Each active user broadcasts information on either the number of logical connections or the average contention time to the stations within the communication reach. This information exchange provides partial understanding of the topology of the network to the stations. Each..