According to the nature of IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN, the bandwidth is
shared among wireless devices. However, the bandwidth cannot be fairly shared
among stations, because some users may use greedy applications which prevent other
applications from connecting to the Internet. These applications are, for example,
video streaming applications, download accelerators and P2P applications. Moreover,
the DCF mechanism which is provided in the 802.11 MAC protocol originates the per-
flow unfairness problem between uplink and downlink flows, as uplink flows usually
dominate downlink flows and lead to unfair bandwidth allocation among wireless
stations.
In this research, we propose an adaptive bandwidth allocation mechanism
to provide per-station fairness. The proposed scheme can control the wireless traffic
for fairness of bandwidth allocation among stations. The bandwidth of each station can
be adjusted to minimize the remaining bandwidth. The proposed scheme also covers a
method to prevent domination of uplink flow which affects per-station fairness.
Furthermore, the proposed scheme can be implemented on wireless access routers.
Hence, in order to support legacy wireless clients, our solution can be efficiently used.
|