Fair Variable Transmission Power Control

Despite its success in saving energy and increasing spatial reuse, the use of variable transmission power control in wireless multihop networks has consequences to fairness. We study a variant of the hidden terminal problem resulting from link asymmetries, and its impact on expected node throughput. We give a model relating the transmission power level and backoff window size to throughput. Based on the analysis, we propose a localized algorithm to set the contention window size of a medium access control protocol according to the transmission power level. In simulation our protocol achieves the highest fairness index among several approaches.