How Optimal are Wireless Scheduling Protocols?

In wireless networks mutual interference impairs the quality of received signals and might even prevent the correct reception of messages. It is therefore of paramount importance to dispose of power control and scheduling algorithms, coordinating the transmission of communication requests. We propose a new measure disturbance in order to comprise the intrinsic difficulty of finding a short schedule for a problem instance. Previously known approaches suffer from extremely bad performance in certain network scenarios even if disturbance is low. To overcome this problem, we present a novel scheduling algorithm for which we give analytical worst-case guarantees on its performance. Compared to previously known solutions, the algorithm achieves a speed up, which can be exponential in the size of the network.