MAC protocol for fair two-way communications in wireless LANs

This paper proposes a novel MAC protocol for fair two-way communications. Our protocol achieves fairness in the throughput between the uplink and downlink under high offered traffic conditions, but the fairness cannot be achieved when using the conventional wireless LAN scheme, CSMA/CA, as the access control method. The proposed scheme introduces a release delay, which is the waiting time to attempt the transmission of the next scheduled packet in the transmission queue. The proposed protocol is evaluated by computer simulation. The results of the simulations that consider high offered traffic verify that the throughput at a station between the uplink and downlink is fair and that the throughput between stations is fair.