Joint Congestion Control and Distributed Scheduling for Throughput Guarantees in Wireless Networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of throughput-optimal cross-layer design of wireless networks. We propose a joint congestion control and scheduling algorithm that achieves a fraction 1/dI(G) of the capacity region, where dI(G) depends on certain structural properties of the underlying connectivity graph G of the wireless network, and also on the type of interference constraints. For a wide range of wireless networks, dI(G) can be upper bounded by a constant, independent of the number of nodes in the network. The scheduling element of our algorithm is the maximal scheduling policy. Although this scheduling policy has been considered in several previous works, the challenges underlying its practical implementation in a fully distributed manner while accounting for necessary message exchanges have not been addressed in the literature. In this article, we propose two algorithms for the distributed implementation of the maximal scheduling policy accounting for message exchanges, and analytically show that they still can achieve the performance guarantee under the 1-hop and 2-hop interference models. We also evaluate the performance of our cross-layer solutions in more realistic network settings with imperfect synchronization under the Signal-to-Interference-Plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) interference model, and compare with the standard layered approaches such as TCP over IEEE 802.11b DCF networks.