An Adaptive Optimization Scheme for IEEE 802.11 DCF to Achieve Fairness Between Uplink and Downlink Flows

Abstract

The data traffic needed to be transferred by APs is much more than the other STAs in the IEEE802.11 DCF networks. However, APs access the wireless link with the same priority as STAs, and thus the throughput between uplink and downlink is of great injustice. In this paper, an adaptive optimization scheme is proposed to achieve fairness between uplink and downlink flows. APs monitor the growing real-time data traffic, and when the network system is in heavy traffic, APs could adaptively adjust the contention window to achieve fairness. Detailed simulation results show that the scheme can effectively adapt to various networks different in data flow numbers and packet size, and consequently achieve fairness between uplink and downlink flows with the total throughput increased.