Additional transmission protocol for fairness enhancement in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs

In IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, when a source node with low data rate occupies the channel resource for a long time, network performance degrades. In order to improve performance, the cooperative communication has been proposed. In the previous cooperative communication protocols, relay nodes deliver data packets only for a source node. In this paper, we propose an additional transmission scheme in which relay nodes select an additional source node based on several information and deliver data packets for the original source node and the selected additional source node. The proposed scheme improves performance and provides fairness among source nodes. Performance of the proposed scheme is investigated by simulation. Our results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the previous protocol in terms of fairness index and throughput.0 Copyright © 2013 The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.