Communications - Scientific Letters of the University of Zilina 2014, 16(1):84-89 | DOI: 10.26552/com.C.2014.1.84-89

Throughput Estimation with Regard to Airtime Consumption Unfairness in Mixed Data Rate Wi-Fi Networks

Alaa Mohammed Abdul-Hadi¹, Olga Tarasyuk¹, Anatoliy Gorbenko¹, Vyacheslav Kharchenko¹, Thomas Hollstein²

¹ Department of Computer Systems and Networks, National Aerospace University "KhAI", Kharkiv, Ukraine

² Department of Computer Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

The paper discusses throughput unfairness inherent in the very nature of mixed data rate Wi-Fi networks employing random media access control technique CSMA/CA. This unfairness exhibits itself through the fact that slow clients consume more airtime to transfer a given amount of data, leaving less airtime for other clients. This decreases the overall network throughput and significantly degrades performance of high data rate clients. In the paper we propose mathematical models considering airtime unfairness and estimating wireless networks throughput depending on number of network connections and their data rates. These models show that all wireless clients have an equal throughput independently of data rates used by them. We verify our theoretical findings by running natural experiment and show that client's throughput approximates to the data rate of the slowest client.

Keywords: wireless networks, Wi-Fi, throughput, airtime consumption, unfairness

Published: February 28, 2014  Show citation