A Performance Guarantee for Maximal Schedulers in Sensor Networks with Cooperative Relays

This paper addresses the question of throughput guarantees through distributed scheduling in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with relay based cooperative communications. We prove that in a single frequency network with bidirectional, equal power communication, low complexity distributed maximal scheduling attains a guaranteed fraction of the maximum throughput region in arbitrary wireless networks. We also show that the guarantees are tight in the sense that they cannot be improved any further with maximal scheduling. Simulation results are also provided to show the performance of a distributed, maximal scheduling algorithm under different network settings.