On perceived throughput and delay fairness of a distributed reservation protocol

Distributed medium access control protocols can be classified into contention-based and contention-free protocols. In this paper, we analyse a contention-free distributed protocol where nodes make reservations on a first-come first-served basis. We evaluate the impact of this first-come first-served approach on the fairness regarding throughput and delay, by means of the ECMA-368. This standard establishes several policies concerning the reservation location and size. To evaluate their influence on the fairness, we compare different subsets of those policies. In terms of throughput, our results show that for low load the system is fair. For high load the overall fairness index decreases. The fairness perceived by the individual nodes varies immensely. In contrast, the delay is overall fair in any traffic situation. The perceived delay fairness, however, highly differs with the node index and applied policies.