Fairness vs Spatial Reuse in Wireless 802.11 Networks

This paper reviews some of our recent results in [1] and [2] on the fairness of decentralized medium access control protocols based on CSMA/CA, such as IEEE 802.11, in large multi-hop wireless networks. We focus on the trade-off between high spatial reuse and fairness. In particular, we show that the widely observed unfairness of the protocol in small network topologies does not always persist in large topologies.