Energy efficient greedy link scheduling in wireless networks

Abstract

Network devices are often required to meet long term average energy constraints due to battery or energy cost considerations. In this paper, we design a simple greedy link scheduling policy for networks in which every transmitter node has an associated long term-average energy constraint. We show that a policy that greedily switches the transmitter node off is sufficient to yield a good throughput performance by characterizing its performance using the Local Pooling Factor (LPF), a parameter previously used to characterize the performance of Greedy Maximal Scheduling (GMS) in wireless networks. We then demonstrate via numerical experiments that for a network in which links originally use a fixed transmit power, a joint greedy scheduling and power control policy that uses two transmit power levels consumes lesser average transmit power compared to Greedy Maximal Scheduling (GMS), while exhibiting similar throughput performance as that of GMS. Through these results, we establish how greedy scheduling can be combined with power control to obtain provable throughput performance guarantees, while also satisfying long term average power constraints in wireless networks.