Interframe-space (IFS)-based distributed fair queuing for proportional fairness in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

In this paper, we propose an interframe-space (IFS)-based distributed-fair-queuing (IDFQ) mechanism to provide proportional fairness service for IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area networks (WLANs). IDFQ is designed to emulate self-clocked fair queuing in a distributed manner. It eliminates the backoff process as implemented in existing work and introduces a new mechanism to assign the IFS value to each station. IDFQ is immune from the implementation problem suffered by existing IFS-based mechanisms and is adaptive to the collision state in the system. Moreover, it can be used to eliminate the performance-anomaly problem of 802.11 medium-access control. The performance of IDFQ is validated by ns-2 simulations. The simulation results show that IDFQ supports fairness service for flows in proportion to their weights and outperforms existing mechanisms in terms of fairness and stability, rendering IDFQ an excellent candidate to provide weighted fairness in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. Index Terms--Distributed fair queuing (DFS), IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area networks (WLANs).