Interframe-space control for fair throughput guarantee in wireless LANs with hidden stations

This paper presents a study of ensuring throughput fairness in wireless local area networks (WLANs) with hidden stations (STAs). In the conventional enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) mechanism, we found throughputs between stations became unfair due to the hidden-station problem even if the same quality-of-service (QoS) priority was given to the stations. In this paper, a dynamic control mechanism called one-step control is proposed to solve this problem, and it uses the interframe-space (IFS) parameter of EDCA and adaptively adjusts the IFS to an appropriate value to achieve throughput fairness according to common information on throughput in the network. The simulation results verified that the proposed mechanism could reduce the influences of hidden stations and ensure throughput fairness while total throughput could be adequately maintained.