Evaluation of Heuristic Strategies for Scheduling, and Power Allocation in STDMA Wireless Networks

A major design issue in wireless multihop networks is the design of the medium access control (MAC) protocols. Spatial TDMA (STDMA) is a "conflict-free" MAC protocol for these networks, thus enabling high spectral utilization. In link-oriented STDMA, the schedule specifies when particular radio links will be activated. Moreover, the use of power control and multiple-rate selection have the potential of improving STDMA network performance. Besides power and traffic adaptive STDMA, in this paper we also, as a comparison, include optimal STDMA. To obtain the optimal scheduling for STDMA, a convex optimization problem is solved using the method reported in [1]. Our results show that the heuristic strategies can provide near optimal solutions regarding end-to-end network throughput.