Improving per-flow fairness in wireless ad hoc networks

Among wireless LAN technologies, the IEEE 802.11MAC standard can be considered the most prominent technology deployed in ad hoc networks. However, IEEE 802.11MAC provides unfair bandwidth allocation among flows', which leads to per-flow unfairness in ad hoc networks. In this paper a new scheme that enables a fair bandwidth allocation to each flow is proposed. In addition to fairness, the proposed scheme provides a positive impact on the network in terms of total performance and medium utility. The characteristics of the proposed scheme are investigated with an ns-2 network simulator.