Achieving Fair Bandwidth Distribution in WiFi Networks: A Game Theoretical Approach

Achieving fair bandwidth distribution among uplink and downlink ows in IEEE802.11 infrastructure networks is a complex issue, due to the well-known features of theDistributed Coordination Function (DCF) which regulates the access to the shared medium.Indeed, the dynamic adaptation of the contention windows causes phenomena of short-termunfairness, while the use of homogeneous contention parameters among the contending nodesmakes the aggregated downlink bandwidth equal to the uplink bandwidth of a single node. Wepropose a dynamic tuning of the contention parameters used by the nodes, based on simplenetwork monitoring functionalities and rational strategies. Speci cally, we propose a game-theoretic analysis of such tuning, devised to guarantee a fair resource sharing among the nodes,while optimizing the per-node uploading and downloading bandwidth.