Opportunistic medium access for wireless networking adapted to decentralized CSI

Abstract

Relative to a centralized operation, opportunistic medium access capitalizing on decentralized multiuser diversity in a channel-aware homogeneous slotted Aloha system with analog-amplitude channels has been shown to incur only partial loss in throughput due to contention. In this context, we provide sufficient conditions for stability as well as upper bounds on average queue sizes, and address three equally important questions. The first one is whether there exist decentralized scheduling algorithms for homogeneous users with higher throughputs than available ones. We prove that binary scheduling maximizes the sum-throughput. The second issue pertains to heterogeneous systems where users may have different channel statistics. Here we establish that binary scheduling not only maximizes the sum of the logs of the average throughputs, but also asymptotically guarantees fairness among users. The last issue we address is extending the results to finite state Markov chain (FSMC) channels. We provide a convex formulation of the corresponding throughput optimization problem, and derive a simple binary-like access strategy