The article investigates fairness in terms of throughput and packet delays among users with diverse channel conditions due to the mobility and fading effects in IEEE 802.11 WLAN (wireless local area networks) environments. From our analytical results, it is shown that 802.11 CSMA/CA can present fairness among hosts with identical link qualities regardless of equal or different data rates applied. Our analytical results further demonstrate that the presence of diverse channel conditions can pose significant unfairness on both throughput and packet delays even with a link adaptation mechanism since the MCSs (modulation and coding schemes) available are limited. The simulation results validate the accuracy of our analytical model.

The article presents a dynamic connection admission control (CAC) and bandwidth reservation (BR) scheme for IEEE 802.16e Broadband Wireless Access networks to simultaneously improve the utilization efficiency of network resources and guarantee QoS for admitted connections. The proposed CAC algorithm dynamically determines the admission criteria according to network loads and adopts an adaptive QoS strategy to improve the utilization efficiency of network resources. After new or handoff connections enter the networks based on current admission criteria, the proposed adaptive BR scheme adjusts the amount of reserved bandwidth for handoffs according to the arrival distributions of new and handoff connections in order to increase the admission opportunities of new connections and provide handoff QoS as well. We conduct simulations to compare the performance of our proposed CAC algorithm and BR scheme with that of other approaches. The results illustrate that our approach can effectively improve the network efficiency in terms of granting more connections by as large as about 22% in comparison with other schemes, and can also guarantee adaptive QoS for admitted new and handoff connections.