Stability Analysis of Reservation-Based Scheduling Policies in Wireless Networks

A major challenge in wireless networks is the ability to maximize the throughput. High throughput in a wireless network requires a relatively low complex scheduling policy with a provable efficiency ratio, which is a measure of the performance of the policy in terms of throughput and stability. For most scheduling policies that achieve provable ratios, at the onset of every frame, a selection is made of a subset of links to transmit data in the immediately following frame. In this paper, we propose a policy that allows links to transmit data in any future frame by means of frame reservations. The new, reservation-based distributed scheduling approach will improve the capacity of the system and provide greater throughput. First, we create a framework to analyze the stability of reservation-based scheduling systems. Then, to demonstrate its efficacy, we propose a reservation-based distributed scheduling policy for IEEE 802.16 mesh networks and use the new framework to find sufficient conditions for the stability of the network under this policy, i.e., we find a lower bound for its efficiency ratio. Finally, by means of simulation, we validate the mathematical analysis and compare the performance of our policy with nonreservation-based policies.