WLANs Fairness Controlling: Distributed TCP Fair Bandwidth Allocation

The number of Internet users and mobile devices with wireless Internet access is continuously increasing. However, the network resource is essentially limited, and fair service is a key issue in bandwidth allocation. In this book the focus is on the issue of fairness among wireless nodes having different numbers and directions of flow as well as different bandwidth requirement of wireless users. It is identified that the current WLANs allocate bandwidth unfairly and the cause of this problem is the irregular space for each wireless node in AP queue. The proposed methods allocates converged bandwidth by introducing Weighted Window method, which adjusts the TCP window size based on the conditions of the network, and Class- Based Weighted Window method, that adjusts the TCP window size of each wireless node according to their required bandwidth. These methods can be applied to the wireless nodes without requiring any modification to the MAC layer. They should be especially useful to professionals in Communication Networks and Wireless ISPs, or anyone else who may be considering fair bandwidth allocating for network architect efforts.