Proportionally fair resource allocation in multi-rate WLANs

Since IEEE has standardized 802.11 protocol for WLANs, significant work has been done in developing rate adaptation algorithms. Most of the rate adaptation algorithms proposed till now are heuristic, suboptimal and are competitive in nature. Even though these algorithms have advantage of implementing in distributed fashion, their throughput performance will be low as these schemes may converge to inefficient Nash equilibrium [1]. On the other hand users may cooperatively choose their rates so that a social optimum can be achieved, but there are no known algorithms that do rate adaptation cooperatively and still be implemented in a distributed fashion. In this paper, we aim at designing a distributed algorithm that achieves a social optimum (by doing rate adaptation cooperatively) while guaranteeing proportional fairness. We also propose an efficient centralized algorithm which serves the same purpose as the distributed algorithm.