Fairness Analysis of Physical Layer Capture Effects in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Physical layer capture is one of the basic causes of throughput unfairness in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs. While existing papers have analyzed the impact of capture on the overall throughput of a 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 it 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 the IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g testbeds.