A novel demand-aware fairness metric for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

Even though literature that focuses on improving fairness among wireless stations in single hop IEEE 802.11 networks is rife, little is discussed on how to measure fairness in such networks when stations have unequal demands for resources. Typically, the performance of such protocols is measured assuming that all stations have equal resource demands under full channel saturation. But if these protocols are evaluated in real environments, where such assumption may not hold, measuring fairness with off the shelf metrics may give inaccurate and inadequate results. To account for these settings, we propose a demand-aware fairness index (DA-index). We argue that the suggested metric is a useful tool for investigating fairness in single-hop IEEE 802.11 networks where resource allocation is governed with backoff protocols. We demonstrate the merits of the proposed metrics with analysis and empirical evaluation.