Scheduling in Multihop Wireless Networks Without Back-Pressure

This paper focuses on scheduling in multihop wireless networks where flows are associated with fixed routes. The well-known back-pressure scheduling algorithm is throughput-optimal, but requires constant exchange of queue length information among neighboring nodes for calculating the “back-pressure.” Moreover, previous research shows that the total queue length along a route increases quadratically as the route length under the back-pressure algorithm, resulting in poor delay performance. In this paper, we propose a self-regulated MaxWeight scheduling, which does not require back-pressure calculation. We prove that the self-regulated MaxWeight scheduling is throughput-optimal (an algorithm is said to be throughput-optimal if it can stabilize any traffic that can be stabilized by any other algorithm). In the simulation part, we show that the self-regulated MaxWeight scheduling has a much better delay performance than the back-pressure algorithm.