Proportional Fairness in Multi-Rate Wireless LANs

In multi-rate wireless LANs, throughput-based fair bandwidth allocation can lead to drastically reduced aggregate throughput. To balance aggregate throughput while serving users in a fair manner, proportional fair or time-based fair scheduling has been proposed to apply at each Access Point (AP). However, since a realistic deployment of wireless LANs can consist of a network of APs, this paper considers proportional fairness in this much wider setting. The technique is to intelligently associate users with APs to achieve optimal proportional fairness in a network of APs.