A distributed fairness support scheduling algorithm in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

Fairness is an important design purpose for shared channel contention based MAC protocols, such as IEEE 802.11 in wireless networks. It is a complex problem due to its many dimensions that include consideration of location-dependent contention, spatial reuse of channels, and desire to achieve fully distributed scheduling in the wireless communication systems. This paper presents a distributed fairness supported scheduling algorithm (DFSS), which accounts for the received service of each flow and adjusts it's backoff time to ensure getting a fair service. In DFSS, each node exchanges the flow's average service index with neighbors as one parameter of determining backoff time. The main advantage of DFSS is that nodes only need to exchange little information to achieve global and local fairness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.