Nonpreemptive Constrained Link Scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper considers the problem of link scheduling with non-preemptive constraint in wireless mesh networks. In real-world implementation, there is often a constraint that a link can only transmit once and occupy consecutive time slots during a frame. We refer to it as the non-preemptive constraint. To date, only few scheduling algorithms in the literature has taken such constraint into consideration. In this paper, we show that optimal non-preemptive link scheduling (NPLS) problems are generally NP-hard and are provably harder to solve than link scheduling without such a constraint. To tackle the problem, a low-complexity list link scheduling (LLS) algorithm is proposed to approximate the optimal NPLS. Our analysis shows that with a randomly selected link-ordering list, throughput degradation of LLS compared to the optimal NPLS is bounded even in the worst case. By carefully constructing the link-ordering list, the performance of LLS can be further greatly improved. In this paper, we propose three schemes to construct link-ordering lists. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated through simulations.