Understanding and mitigating TCP starvation in 802.11 wireless mesh networks

It is well known that the pervasive IEEE 802.11 MAC is intrinsically unfair [1, 3]. In particular, in the topology shown in Fig. 1(a), when links AB and CD both carry backlogged transmissions, the packets from sender A experience persistent collisions at node B while sender C enjoys collision-free transmission to D. Node A can transmit successfully only if it is able to “insert” its packets into the small inter-packet gaps of C's packets. Thus, we refer to the topology in Fig. 1(a) as the unfair topology and to C and A as the superior and inferior nodes respectively.