Cross-layer based adaptive wireless traffic control for per-flow and per-station fairness

Abstract

In the IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, the bandwidth is not fairly shared among stations due to the distributed coordination function (DCF) mechanism in the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. It introduces the per-flow and per-station unfairness problems between uplink and downlink flows, as the uplink flows usually dominate the downlink flows. In addition, some users may use greedy applications such as video streaming, which may prevent other applications from connecting to the Internet. In this article, we propose an adaptive cross-layer bandwidth allocation mechanism to provide per-station and per-flow fairness. To verify the effectiveness and scalability, our scheme is implemented on a wireless access router and numerous experiments in a typical wireless environment with both TCP and UDP traffic are conducted to evaluate performance of the proposed scheme.