Analysis of Spatial Unfairness in Wireless LANs

Physical layer capture is understood to be one of the basic causes of throughput unfairness in a IEEE 802.11 system. While papers have analyzed the impact of capture on the overall throughput of a single 802.11 cell, we are unaware of any analysis of the relative unfairness among users as result of capture. Since this unfairness is related to the relative location of users, we call this as spatial unfairness. We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first such analysis that characterizes the relative throughput of users as a function of the users' distance from the access point (AP). We experimentally validate our analysis using a single 802.11b cell testbed.