Fair Time Sharing Protocol: A Solution for IEEE 802.11b Hot Spots

To adapt the data rate in accordance with the quality of the link, the IEEE 802.11b standard proposes the variable rate shifting functionality. This intrinsic functionality of the 802.11b products progressively degrades the bit rate when a host detects unsuccessful frame transmissions. Furthermore, the basic CSMA/CA channel access method guarantees that the long-term channel access probability is equal for all hosts. When one host captures the channel for a long time because its bit rate is low, it penalizes other hosts that use the higher rate, inciting a performance anomaly. This paper aims at avoiding this performance anomaly and the consequent waste of bandwidth. We propose the Fair Time Sharing (FTS) approach to perform real fair sharing among the active hosts in the hot spot, thus avoiding the performance degradation caused by one or more slow hosts. This paper presents the FTS architecture and its performance evaluation, showing the improvement achieved.