Capacity of IEEE 802.11-Based Ad Hoc Networks with Fairness Constraints

The capacity of IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks is usually a critical issue because multi-hop communication requires additional capacity which is not available for transmitting application data. Further, the sharing of the available capacity among different connections should be fair. In this paper we present an approach for calculating an upper bound capacity for a given fairness constraint. Our approach can be used for networks with any node distribution, routing and traffic pattern. We also present simulation results for the upper bound capacity of an example scenario and compare it with the theoretical upper bound capacity calculated by Gupta and Kumar. Our results show that IEEE 802.11 provides a capacity which is considerable lower than the theoretical upper bound capacity