Low Delay MAC Scheduling for Frequency-Agile Multi-Radio Wireless Networks

Recent trends suggest that cognitive radio based wireless networks will be frequency agile and the nodes will be equipped with multiple radios capable of tuning across large swaths of spectrum. The MAC scheduling problem in such networks refers to making intelligent decisions on which communication links to activate at which time instant and over which frequency band. The challenge in designing a low-complexity distributed MAC, that achieves low delay, is posed by two additional dimensions of cognitive radio networks: interference graphs and data rates that are frequency-band dependent, and explosion in number of feasible schedules due to large number of available frequency-bands. In this paper, we propose MAXIMAL-GAIN MAC, a distributed MAC scheduler for frequency agile multi-band networks that simultaneously achieves the following: (i) optimal network-delay scaling with respect to the number of communicating pairs, (ii) low computational complexity of O(log²(maximum degree of the interference graphs)) which is independent of the number of frequency bands, number of radios per node, and overall size of the network, and (iii) robustness, i.e., it can be adapted to a scenario where nodes are not synchronized and control packets could be lost. Our proposed MAC also achieves a throughput provably within a constant fraction (under isotropic propagation) of the maximum throughput. Due to a recent impossibility result, optimal delay-scaling could only be achieved with some amount of throughput loss . Extensive simulations using OMNeT++ network simulator shows that, compared to a multi-band extension of a state-of-art CSMA algorithm (namely, Q-CSMA), our asynchronous algorithm achieves a 2.5x reduction in delay while achieving at least 85% of the maximum achievable throughput. Our MAC algorithms are derived from a novel local search based technique.