Opportunistic Routing and Scheduling for Wireless Networks

In spatial time division multiple access wireless mesh networks, not all links can be activated simultaneously, as links scheduled for transmission must satisfy the specified SINR requirements. Previously, slot assignment has been done on a link basis, where a set of links is selected for transmission in a given slot. However, if selected links are in deep fade or have no traffic to transmit, the slot is wasted. Thus, a node-based scheme was proposed, where a set of nodes is selected for transmission. Which link to be used by a node depends on the links' instantaneous traffic load. Although this allows us to exploit multi-user diversity, it creates a planning discrepancy: slot assignment is designed based on long-term channel statistics, but scheduling on short-term channel fading conditions. Consequently, the performance gain of the node-based scheme is not consistent: it is marginal under certain scenarios. To avoid the design discrepancy, we develop a new slot-assignment and routing framework in this paper. The new approach incorporates short-term channel fading statistics to optimize the long term slot assignment, routing and scheduling simultaneously. Hence, multi-user diversity can be exploited more efficiently. Not only is the performance gain of the resulting system significant (can be as much as 64% higher throughput than the scheme introduced by Chen and Lea), it is also less topology dependent compared with the one by Chen and Lea.