On Per-Flow Fairness and Scheduling in Wireless Multihop Networks

In wireless multihop networks communication between two-end nodes is carried out by hopping over multiple short wireless links. Traditional CSMA/CA based media access control does not work well in a multihop scenario, since transmitters are often out of reach of other users´ sensing range. Therefore TDMA seems to be a more promising solution. Several algorithms may be found in the literature for scheduling TDMA transmissions for these networks. These algorithms try to determine the optimal scheduling, in order to increase the capacity and reduce the delay for a given network topology. In our previous work, a TDMA scheduling algorithm has been proposed that schedules the transmissions in a fair manner and takes into account the communication requirements of the active flows of the network. In this research effort, we compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with several TDMA scheduling algorithms, in terms of frame length, throughput and fairness. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm exhibits improved performance compared to the other solutions, not only in terms of fairness, but also in terms of throughput.