Study of IEEE 802.11 Fairness and its Interaction with Routing Mechanism
Zhifei Li, Sukumar Nandi, Anil Kumar Gupta · 2003
The MAC protocol IEEE 802.11, used in the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), suffers from the well-known fairness problem. In this paper, using static routing, we first study the MAC fairness by considering three factors including the hiddenterminal, capture, and imprecise EIFS, which are all related to the signal attenuation property of the wireless networks. Since the MAC protocol and the routing protocol interact with each other, we then study the interaction between MAC fairness and routing mechanism by replacing static routing with AODV and DSDV. The main lessons learnt from our studies include: (i)we should distinguish between the MAC fairness and the overall system fairness, (ii)in studying the MAC fairness, we should isolate the factors (e.g., routing protocol) that are not directly related to the MAC layer, and (iii)to study the overall system fairness, in addition to the study of MAC fairness, we should also consider the effects of many other factors such as the routing mechanism, traffic pattern, mobility pattern etc.