Max-Min Fairness in 802.11 Mesh Networks

In this paper, we establish that the rate region of a large class of IEEE 802.11 mesh networks is log-convex, immediately allowing standard utility fairness methods to be generalized to this class of networks. This creates a solid theoretical underpinning for fairness analysis and resource allocation in this practically important class of networks. For the special case of max-min fairness, we use this new insight to obtain an almost complete characterization of the fair rate allocation and a remarkably simple, practically implementable method for achieving max-min fairness in 802.11 mesh networks.