A Novel Solution for End-to-End Fairness Problem in Wireless Mesh Networks

A wireless mesh network (WMN) provides a flexible and low-cost solution for end users to connect to the Internet through its multi-hop infrastructure. For such a network to proliferate, a fundamental problem that must be solved is to ensure the fair allocation of network bandwidth to all participating parties. This paper proposes a cross-layer design for achieving end-to-end maxmin fairness in WMNs. At the network layer, it allocates maxmin shares of network capacity to end-to-end flows. At the MAC layer, it realizes the maxmin bandwidth allocation through a two-level packet scheduling algorithm. The proposed design is able to equalize the end-to-end bandwidth allocation to competing flows that share common bottlenecks, while fully utilizing the network capacity. Comparing with previous works, our solution has two advantages. It is based on the popular IEEE 802.11 DCF. It achieves far better fairness (or weighted fairness) among end-to-end flows.