Two challenging objectives in the design of a MAC protocol for wireless local area networks are to achieve fairness in the services provided to various sessions or terminals, and to increase the overall network throughput. In its simplest form, fairness among a number of entities means that they each receive a predetermined portion of the capacity of the link or channel in question. A variety of scheduling algorithms have been proposed to implement fairness on a single link of a wired network; these algorithms are all centralized algorithms. Compared to a wired network, when we consider fairness in a wireless local area network with a single channel, two new problems arise. The first problem is that of efficient implementation of a given fair queuing algorithm in the distributed wireless environment where each node only possesses partial information about the existing traffic demand in the LAN. The second problem is that of generalizing the notion of fairness to an extended wireless LAN where channel reuse can be practiced. In regards to this point, there is a major difference between fully connected wireless networks, i.e., etworks where all terminals hear each other and therefore channel reuse is not a possibility, and partially connected networks where simultaneous transmissions on the channel by terminals with sufficient distance is possible. Whereas a fully connected wireless LAN can be likened to a single server and queue, as far as the notion of fairness is concerned, the situation in a partially connected wireless LAN is far more complex. Here, the wireless resource is extended over the space; yet we cannot view it as a number of distributed and independent resources, since using the channel in one area precludes its usage in nearby areas. An important conceptual problem, therefore, is how to extend the notion of fairness to this distributed environment, while allowing for simultaneous use of the channel by multiple terminals, where possible, in order to increase the overall throughput. Though, a variety of algorithms have been proposed to solve this challenge. In this thesis, we overview these algorithms and analyze some of them to realize whether they really achieve fairness or not. We show that one of these algorithms can work correctly in fully connected networks and only under certain conditions. In addition, we propose a new fairness concept for partially connected networks that can increase throughput and also benefit from spatial reuse. This new definition of fairness can solve the tradeoff between fairness and channel reuse. This concept is similar to the "Max-Min fairness" in multi-hop wired networks. Max-Min fairness tries to attain fairness while improving the. Keywords: Wireless local area network, Fairness, Channel reuse, Throughput, Max-Min Fair