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3098

AchievingAirtime Fairnessand Maximum Throughput in IEEE 802.11under Various TfansmissionDurations

Hyungho LEEi"), Student Member qnd Chong-Ho CHOII, Nonmember

SUMMARY IEEE 802.1I Wireless LANS (WLANS) suppoft multiple rates. transmissionrates.w}ten softe stationstransmil at low transmission t]rc peformance of the high transmissionrate stations degradesheavily, and this phenomenonis known as the perfomance anomaly. As a solution to the performanceanomaly,airtime faimess was proposed.Howevet the distributedcoordinationfunction (DCF) of IEEE 802.11camot provide the airtime faimess to all competing stationsbecause protocol is designed to ensureiair allempt probability. In this paper,we proposea new medium accesscontrol, successful transmission time fair MAC (STF-MAC), which is fair in tems ofsuccessful fansmission time and also providesthe maxi mum aggregate throughputof a basic serviceset (BSS) in distributedmanner STF-MAC can be easily applied to solve the uplinlvdownlink faimess problem in infrastrDcture mode. Tbrough simulations,we demonstrate that STF-MAC not only rcmedicslhe performanceanomalybut also maximizes h r l h e a g g r e g a lte r o u g h p uu r d e r r h e l a i m e \ ' c o n s t r a i n r . keJ words: IEEE 802.11, petomance anonab, ainine fdines, DCE MAC

1.

Introduction

Sincethe IEEE 802.11standard was finalized in 1997.wireless LANs (wLANs) have been acceptedwidely and become one of the most popular wircless network technology. Because WLAN is easyto deploy,one can easily access the Intemet via WLAN accesspoints (APs) in campuses,offices, and homes. WLAN technology is also embeddedin many devicessuch as notebook PCs, tablet PCs and smart phones. Unlike the legacy IEEE 802.11, which only supporls I and 2Mbps. today'sIEEE 802.11stations support multiple transmissionrates,so that a station can changeits transmissionrate dependingon the channelcondition. For example,IEEE 802.11b supportstbur transmission rates, 1, ratesfrom 2, 5.5 and I 1 Mbps, 802.11g twelve transmission I to 54 Mbps, and the recentIEEE 802.11nsuppoftsvarious ratesup to 600 Mbps. transmission As the transmissionrate of a station in a network increases,one may expect the throughput of the station to increase proportional to the transmissiol rate. However such an expectationis often not realized becauseof the phenomenoncalled "performanceanomaly" []. Since the IEEE 802.11 distributedcoordination function (DCF). which is commonly used at the medium accesscontol (MAC) layer, tries to provide the same attemptprobability to each station resardlessof the station's transmissionrcte Manuscript received May 3, 2011. Manuscript revised July 12,2011. rTheauthors with theSchool Electrical Engineering and are of Korea. Computer Science, ASRI,Seoul National University, a)E-mail:dayghost24@csl.snu.ac.kr DOI: 10. 1587/transcom.E94.B.3098

or payload size, high-rate stationscan only have the same throughput as low-rate stations. Therefore, the aggregate thrcughput of a basic senice set (BSS) is affectedgreatly \a by the stations ith the Iouesttransmission rate. In this paper, we addressthe "performanceanomaly" problem of IEEE 802.11 MAC and propose the notion of successful transmissiotttime faintess (ST-faimess) solve to it. ST-faimessis a fairnesscriterion basedon the consideration that the collision probabilities are different among stationwhen the atternptprobabilitiesare different. The papersdealingwith the performance anomalyproblem assume that the collision probabilitiesof stationsare the same,even though their attemptprobabilitiesare different [2]-[8]. The assumptionis not true becausethe collision probability of a station is determinedby its neighboring stations' attempt probabilities.Consequently, dilTerentiation attemptprobin ability resultsin differentiationin collision probability. Another problemofIEEE 802.1I DCF is the unfairness betweenuplink and downlink flows in a BSS. In a WLAN point (AP) connectedto hot spot, there usually is an access the a wired network and many mobile stationstry to accass Internet via the AP However.in the DCF. the AP and each stationhave the sameanemptprobability. Thus, the seivice is biasedtoward uplink flows (from the stationsto AP) and downlink flows (from AP to the stations)tend to staNe [9]. SeveralMAC protocols have beenproposedto remedy this problem [10]-[4]. We can easily solve this problem by applying the conceptof ST-faimess. The contributionsof this paper are as follows. l) The notion of ST:faimess is introduced to achieve fairness in IEEE 802.i1 WLANS. 2) The ttuoughput of a station in multirate environmentis analyzedunder ST-faimess. Based on the analysis, we find the attempt probability of a station that gives the maximum aggregatethroughput while ensuring ST-fairness. 3) The successfultransmissiontime fair medium access control (STF-MAC) is proposed to solve the faimess problems of IEEE 802.11. 4) The uplinlddownlink unfaimessproblem of DCF is solved by ensuring ST-faimess. The rest of this paper is organizedas follows: Sect.2 anomalyand someprevibriefly introducesthe performance to remedy this problem. An analyticalmodel for ous works to a multirate network is presented solve the fairnessproblems in Sect.3. STF-MAC is proposedin Sect.4 and the of by effectiveness STF-MAC is investigated simulation in Sect.5. Conclusionfollows in Sect.6.

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