A Distributed Fair MAC Flow Allocation and Scheduling Framework for IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Mesh Networks

We present a distributed fair MAC flow allocation and scheduling framework for IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks. The framework consists of (1) a modified wireless ad hoc routing protocol to take into account bandwidth requirement, (2) a link information dissemination protocol to propagate local topology information, (3) a cooperative gradient-based iterative algorithm to allocate fairly MAC flow bandwidth and (4) a distributed fair MAC scheduler to coordinate access to the channel according to the allocated bandwidth. We stress the importance of our framework's practicality, such that it is easily deployable in real IEEE 802.11 based devices, and, most importantly, it is extensible to include other services such as QoS routing and admission control. Before carrying out an expensive on-site performance evaluation, we conduct numerous simulations to evaluate our framework, and the fairness index indicates, under extremely high traffic rates, that our framework is fair to more than 90% of the MAC flows in the network.