A fair scheduling algorithm with traffic classification for wireless networks

Abstract

Wireless channels are characterized by more serious bursty and location-dependent errors. Many packet scheduling algorithms have been proposed for wireless networks to guarantee fairness and delay bounds. However, most existing schemes do not consider the difference of traffic natures among packet flows. This will cause the delay-weight coupling problem. In particular, serious queuing delays may be incurred for real-time flows. To resolve this problem, we propose a traffic-dependent wireless fair queuing (TD-FQ) algorithm that takes traffic types of flows into consideration when scheduling packets. The proposed TD-FQ algorithm not only alleviates queuing delay of real-time flows, but also guarantees bounded delays and fairness for all flows.