Professor Benny Van Houdt and PhD fellow Robbe Block from the University of Antwerp won the Best Paper Award with a research paper they presented at the latest edition of VALUETOOLS, the International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools.
Their paper fills the gap in research on spatial fairness of multi-channel random-access carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) networks, which is in contrast to the well understood issue of spatial unfairness in single-channel CSMAs.
In their research, they considered a multi-channel CSMA network ‘with n saturated links, where each link can be active on at most one of the C available channels at any time.’ They then developed fast algorithms that they used to study the spatial fairness in multi-channel CSMAs, both standard ones and those with channel-repacking.
Building on recent findings that suggest that, in a single channel CSMA line network, fairness can be achieved through a simple formula, they demonstrate that this formula achieves fairness in a multi-channel setting as well, under heavy and low traffic. Though the researchers found that the simple formula does not eliminate all spatial unfairness in the multi-channel setting, their numerical experiments show that it does eliminate most of the spatial unfairness in a multi-channel network, too.
For more details, read the full paper.
