Performance and fairness enhancement in IEEE 802.11 WLAN networks

The multi-rate transmission mechanism in IEEE 802.11 can improve its reliability and robustness. However, it causes a performance anomaly. After analyzing the reasons for the performance anomaly in multi-rate mechanism, we propose a new scheme to solve the performance anomaly. By adjusting packet size according to the transmission rate, this scheme guarantees that these nodes with different transmit rates can access wireless channel fairly. Theoretical analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme can well solve the performance anomaly problem.