Distributed Proportional Fair Scheduling for IEEE802.11 Wireless LANs

Abstract

In the time varying wireless channel, opportunistic scheduling is one of the important techniques to achieving the rich diversities inherent in wireless communications. However, most existing scheduling schemes require centralized scheduling and little work has been done on developing distributed algorithms The proportional fair scheduling is one of the representative opportunistic scheduling for centralized networks. In this paper, we propose distributed proportional fair scheduling (DPFS) scheme for wireless LAN network. In the proposed DPFS scheme, each receiver estimates channel condition and calculates independently its own priority with probabilistic manner, which can reduce excessive probing overhead required to gather the channel conditions of all receivers. We evaluate the proposed DPFS using extensive simulation and simulation results show that DPFS obtains higher network throughput than conventional scheduling schemes while maintaining fairness among users.