Random Access Scheduling without Message Passing: A Collision-based AIMD Approach

Abstract

Wireless scheduling has been extensively studied in the literature. Since Maximum Weighted Scheduling has been developed and shown to achieve the optimal performance, there have been many efforts to overcome its complexity issue. Random access has attracted much attention due to its potential for low complexity and distributed control, which are desirable for scheduling in multi-hop wireless networks. Although several interesting random access scheduling schemes have been shown to be provably efficient, they suffer in practice from high packet delays or severe performance degradation due to the control overhead to exchange information between neighboring links. In this paper, we develop a novel random access scheduling scheme that does not need message passing. We pay attention to the interplay between the links and control their access probabilities targeting at a certain collision rate. We employ the Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithm for convergence, and show that our proposed scheme can achieve the same performance bound as the previous random access schemes with high control overhead. We verify our results through simulations and show that our proposed scheme achieves the performance close to that of the centralized greedy algorithm.