Enforcing End-To-End Proportional Fairness with Bounded Buffer Overflow Probabilities in Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks

In this paper, we present a distributed flow-based access scheme for slotted-time protocols, that provides proportional fairness in ad-hoc wireless networks under constraints on the buffer overflow probabilities at each node. The proposed scheme requires local information exchange at the link-layer and end-to-end information exchange at the transport-layer, and is cast as a nonlinear program. A medium access control protocol is said to be proportionally fair with respect to individual end-to-end flows in a network, if the product of the end-to-end flow rates is maximized. A key contribution of this work lies in the construction of a distributed dual approach that comes with low computational overhead. We discuss the convergence properties of the proposed scheme and present simulation results to support our conclusions.