On Supporting Weighted Service Differentiation in Multi-Packet Reception Wireless Networks: A Distributed Tree-Based Approach

The conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols assume that only one packet (frame) can be received at a given time. However, with the advent of spread spectrum, antenna arrays, and sophisticated signal processing techniques, it is now possible to achieve multiple-packet reception (MPR) in wireless networks. With MPR, the network capacity can be remarkably increased, but so far, how to achieve fair bandwidth allocation for the stations with different quality of service (QoS) requirements in such networks is still a problem. To solve this problem, we propose a distributed method that can support multiple priority classes in the MPR-capable wireless networks with weighted fair share. In particular, this method assigns each class a frame transmission probability to reflect its relative weight among the different data traffic flows. A closed-form expression of system throughput is derived for each class in the environment, and it is numerically evaluated with different simulation scenarios. The results show that the method can achieve the weighted fairness under different numbers of priority classes and different numbers of stations in the networks.