2006 Reports

Throughput and Fairness in CSMA/CA Wireless Networks

Chang, Hoon; Misra, Vishal; Rubenstein, Daniel Stuart

While physical layer capture has been observed in real implementations of wireless devices accessing the channel like 802.11, log-utility fair allocation algorithms based on accurate channel models describing the phenomenon have not been developed. In this paper, using a general physical channel model, we develop an allocation algorithm for log-utility fairness. To maximize the aggregate utility, our algorithm determines channel access attempt probabilities of nodes using partial derivatives of the utility. Our algorithm is verified through extended simulations. The results indicate that our algorithm could quickly achieve allocations close to the optimum with 8.6% accuracy error on average.