A Novel Flow-Aware Fair Scheduler for Multi Transmit/Receive Wireless Networks

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of deriving a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) schedule for multi-hop wireless networks that allow nodes to perform multiple transmissions/receptions to/from all of their neighbors simultaneously over the same frequency. To date, there are a number of link schedulers for the networks in question but they do not consider flow rate or any notion of fairness when deriving a TDMA schedule. Henceforth, we address this critical gap by proposing a link scheduler, called Algo-Fair, that, in addition to maximizing the number of links in each slot, also provides fairness among flows. In addition, it uses a novel augmentation step to distribute spare capacity fairly among flows. We believe this step is general and can be applied readily in other forms of wireless networks. Apart from that, Algo-Fair generates a schedule directly while yielding a fair rate allocation. This is different from existing methods that first use a flow contention graph to compute a fair share before deriving the corresponding schedule, which may not exist. Numerical results show Algo-Fair has higher fairness, minimum rate, and average total throughput than competing approaches, and low end-to-end delay.