TITLE:
FMAC: Fair Mac Protocol for Achieving Proportional Fairness in Multi-Rate WSNs
AUTHORS:
Nusaibah M. Al-Ratta, Mznah Al-Rodhaan, Abdullah Al-Dhelaan
KEYWORDS:
Backoff, DCF, IEEE 802.11, Proportional Fairness, Wireless Sensor Networks
JOURNAL NAME:
Communications and Network,
Vol.7 No.2,
April
9,
2015
ABSTRACT: In a multi-rate wireless environment, slow
nodes occupy the channel for longer time than fast nodes and thus the total
throughput of the network will be reduced. In this research, we study the
problem of fairness in multi-rate wireless sensor networks. To improve the
fairness, we propose a new protocol, FMAC (Fair MAC protocol) that is based on
IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol to achieve proportional fairness between all nodes.
FMAC protocol includes medium delay periods within Backoff algorithm to utilize
the idle slots of time and reduce the number of collisions and then number of
retransmissions, and thus reducing the energy consumption, which is very
critical in wireless sensor networks. The experimental results show that
transmissions become faster with less collisions and power consumption when
applying FMAC, while the aggregated throughput and proportional fairness are
increased. The detailed performance evaluation and comparisons are provided
using the simulation.