A Proposal of Throughput Allocation Method for Concurrently Communicating Two or Three Hosts in Wireless Local-Area Network

Abstract

Nowadays, the IEEE802.11n wireless local-area network (WLAN) has gained high popularity for the Internet access due to the flexible and easy installations. In WLAN, the throughput unfairness may appear when multiple hosts are concurrently communicating with the same access point (AP). Previously, we have studied the TCP fairness control method using the PI control to provide the equal throughput for them. However, this method can suffer from the fluctuation and slow convergence of the throughput since the feedback control is applied using the inaccurate measured throughput. Besides, it is difficult to allocate different throughputs to the hosts. In this paper, we propose the throughput allocation method for concurrently communicating two or three hosts in WLAN. By adopting the traffic control (tc) command at the AP, it directly controls the throughput for each host. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposal through experiments using the elastic WLAN system testbed with one AP and two or three hosts