Distributed greedy approximation to maximum weighted independent set for scheduling with fading channels

Abstract

Developing scheduling mechanisms that can simultaneously achieve throughput optimality and good delay performance often require solving the Maximum Independent Weighted Set (MWIS) problem. However, under most realistic network settings, the MWIS problem can be shown to be NP-hard. In non-fading environments, low-complexity scheduling algorithms have been provided that converge either to the MWIS solution in time or to a solution that achieves at least a provable fraction of the achievable throughput. However, in more practical systems the channel conditions can vary at faster time-scales than convergence occurs in these lower-complexity algorithms. Hence, these algorithms cannot take advantage of the opportunistic gain, and may no longer guarantee good performance. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity scheduling scheme that performs provably well under fading channels and is amenable to implement in a distributed manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scheduling scheme under fading environments that requires only local information, has a low complexity that grows logarithmically with the network size, and achieves provable performance guarantees (which is arbitrarily close to that of the well-known centralized Greedy Maximal Scheduler). Through simulations we verify that both the throughput and the delay under our proposed distributed scheduling scheme are close to that of the optimal solution to MWIS. Further, we implement a preliminary version of our algorithm in a testbed by modifying the existing IEEE 802.11 DCF. The preliminary experiment results show that our implementation successfully accounts for wireless fading, and attains the opportunistic gains in practice, and hence substantially outperforms IEEE 802.11 DCF.