Achieving transmission fairness in distributed medium access wireless mesh networks: design challenges, guidelines and future directions

Wireless mesh networking gained an international interest over the years as a result to high recognition in the wireless industry as a cost effective, scalable, wider coverage and capacity capable wireless technology. The contention based distributed medium access in wireless networks has advanced not only in supporting the quality of multimedia but also achieving high throughput and to minimize packet delay overheads in legacy systems. Unfortunately, the impact of such enhancement has not been fully justified with mesh network environments yet. The medium access frames are required to be contended over multi-hops to overcome the challenges of improving overall system performance through concurrent transmissions. The goal of this paper is to discuss the issues and challenges of transmission fairness and the effect of concurrent transmission on system performance. To mitigate transmission fairness issues, we review existing open literature on mesh networking and provide guidelines for better system design and deployment. Finally, we conclude the paper with future research directions. This study may help network designer and planner to overcome the remaining challenging issues in the design and deployment of WMNs worldwide