Max-Min Fair Throughput in Multi-Gateway Multi-Rate Mesh Networks

The problem how to determine the capacity of and achieve fairness in mesh networks is one of the key topics in practical and theoretical research on mesh networks. Max-min fairness is one way to define fairness and several algorithms how to compute max-min fair rate allocations are already published. In this paper we make two major contributions to this area of research: First, we formulate an algorithm achieving max-min fairness among end-to-end flows based on the effective load of a collision domain. This allows us to determine max-min fair rate allocations in a multi-gateway, multi-channel mesh network with equal rates for all links. Second, we extend this algorithm for heterogeneous link rates.