Service index-based fairness scheduling in wireless ad hoc networks

Fairness is an important design purpose for shared channel contention-based MAC protocols, such as IEEE 802.11 in wireless networks. Yet, it is a complex problem due to its many dimensions that include consideration of location-dependent contention, spatial reuse of channels, and the desire to achieve fully distributed scheduling in wireless communication systems. Accordingly, this paper presents a received service index-based fairness scheduling algorithm (SIB-FS) that accounts for the service received by each flow and adjusts the backoff time to ensure a fair service. In SIB-FS, each node exchanges the node’s average service index with its neighbors as a parameter to determine the backoff time. The main advantage of SIB-FS is that the nodes only need to exchange a little information to achieve global and local fairness. ns-2 is used to simulate the SIB-FS and achieve the desired fairness and throughput.