Proportional fair throughput allocation in multirate IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

Abstract

Under heterogeneous radio conditions, Wireless LAN stations may use different modulation schemes, leading to a heterogeneity of bit rates. In such a situation, 802.11 DCF allocates the same throughput to all stations independently of their transmitting bit rate; as a result, the channel is used by low bit rate stations most of the time, and efficiency is low. In this paper, we propose a more efficient throughput allocation criterion based on proportional fairness. We find out that, in a proportional fair allocation, the same share of channel time is given to high and low bit rate stations, and, as a result, high bit rate stations obtain more throughput. We propose two schemes of the upcoming 802.11e standard to achieve this allocation, and compare their delay and throughput performance.