Optimal Rate Assignment Strategy to Minimize Average Waiting Time in Wireless Networks

In a wireless network that supports multiple flows, allocation of bandwidth resource among the flows is one of the critical problems. Different allocation strategies have been developed based on different optimization objectives. Unfortunately, these objectives may not reflect directly the time needed for a flow to transmit what it wants. In this paper, we define a new objective, average waiting time, that reflects the average time needed for the flows to finish their transmissions. For small networks, we develop an optimal scheme that minimizes the average waiting time. We extend the mechanism for general networks, and simulation results show that it can significantly reduce the average waiting time when compared with other existing mechanisms.