Achieving proportional fairness with a control theoretic approach in error-prone 802.11e WLANs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control theoretic method to achieve proportional fairness in error-prone 802.11e WLANs by adaptively adjusting contention windows, resulting in accurate and fast convergence for QoS provisioning.

Contribution

It presents a novel control-based technique to dynamically optimize contention windows for fairness in error-prone WLANs, improving upon static or heuristic methods.

Findings

High accuracy in throughput allocation

Fast convergence in diverse network scenarios

Effective QoS differentiation

Abstract

This letter proposes a control theoretic approach to achieve proportional fairness amongst access categories (ACs) in an error-prone EDCA WLAN for provision of distinct QoS requirements and priority parameters. The approach adaptively adjusts the minimum contention window of each AC to derive the station attempt probability to its optimum which leads to a proportional fair allocation of station throughputs. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed control approach has high accuracy performance and fast convergence speed for general network scenarios.