Reservation-based distributed scheduling in wireless networks

Several distributed scheduling policies for wireless networks that achieve a provable efficiency ratio have been developed recently. These policies are characterized by the selection, at the onset of every time slot, of a subset of links according to the interference model of the network and the length of the links´ queues. The selected subset of links is for the next time slot only. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the stability analysis of distributed scheduling policies that allow links to transmit data packets in any future time slots by means of slot reservations. Within this framework, we propose and analyze a reservation-based distributed scheduling policy for IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. We find sufficient conditions for the stability of the network when the traffic uses one hop. Specifically, we prove a lower bound for its efficiency ratio by evaluating the stability conditions obtained from our proposed framework. Finally, we compare this lower bound with the capacity achieved in simulation results.