A Cross-Layer Design for Per-Flow and Weighted Fairness between Uplink and Downlink in WLANs

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a fairness issue between uplink and downlink flows in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). We propose a cross-layer adaptive algorithm which dynamically adjusts the minimum contention window size of Access Point (AP) according to the amount of downlink users and channel environments to achieve per-flow fairness. In case that uplink and downlink transmissions are with different bandwidth demands for various applications, our algorithm can efficiently find the optimal contention window size which provides weighted fairness based on their resource requirements. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively provide both per-flow fairness and weighted fairness in a varying heterogeneous WLAN environment.