On Random Access Scheduling for Multimedia Traffic in Multihop Wireless Networks with Fading Channels

In this paper, we develop distributed random access scheduling schemes that exploit the time-varying nature of fading channels for multimedia traffic in multihop wireless networks. It should be noted that while centralized scheduling solutions can achieve optimal throughput under this setting, they incur high-computational complexity and require centralized coordination requiring global channel information. The proposed solution not only achieves provable performance guarantees under a wide range of interference models, but also can be implemented in a distributed fashion using local information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first distributed scheduling mechanism for fading channels that achieves provable performance guarantees. We show through simulations that the proposed schemes achieve better empirical performance than other known distributed scheduling schemes.