Spatial Unfairness in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Physical layer capture is one of the main causes of throughput unfairness in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs. While existing work have analyzed the impact of physical layer capture on the total system throughput of a cell, we analyze 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. Our analysis characterizes the relative throughput of users as a function of the users' distance from the Access Point (i.e., as a function of received signal strength). We validate the accuracy of our analysis using extensive simulations.