Abstract

Fairness in Medium Access Control protocols is a challenging problem because of the existence of the hidden terminal problem, partially connected network topology and lack of central administration. In this report, we present a comparative study of fairness in two MAC protocols, known as Distributed Fair Scheduling (DFS) and Estimation Based Fair Medium Access (EBFMA). We also compared these two protocols with the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). Our study shows that in the fully connected network, although EBFMA has the best fairness index, it has the worst throughput. In the fully connected network, the fairness index of IEEE 802.11 and that of DFS do not have significant differences while DFS has better throughput than IEEE. In a partially connected network, IEEE 802.11 is seen to have the best fairness index and throughput because of its binary exponential backoff algorithm while DFS and EBFMA have far worse fairness index and throughput.