Fair QoS multi-resource allocation for uplink traffic in WLAN

In wireless local area network (WLAN), improving the quality of service (QoS) of users is often at odd with striking fairness among users. In this work, we suggest that in WLAN, multiple types of network resources should be jointly allocated to users to achieve “QoS fairness”, which is a new fairness concept targeting at balancing QoS and fairness in WLAN by allocating multiple types of network resources to users. To this end, we first transform user QoS requirements to multi-resource demands and apply the dominant resource fairness scheme to allocate network resources for each user. We prove several salient QoS-based fairness properties based on a model mapping between QoS and resources. We further discuss about more general conditions for diverse mapping models where QoS fairness properties can be satisfied. We find that the QoS fairness properties can be guaranteed as long as the mapping model meets a few practical requirements, indicating the wide applicability of our scheme. To consolidate our multi-resource allocation scheme, we design a practical protocol for WLAN. The simulation results validate that the QoS fairness can be guaranteed in practical WLAN scenario.