Scheduling based on message in ad hoc networks

Ad hoc wireless network is expected to play a major role in nomadic computing and communications in the home, office, and many other venues because of the characteristic of self-creating, self-organizing and self-administering. Most of the research in this area is focused on designing efficient routing protocols. However, few deal with the message scheduling in QoS improvement. In this paper, a new scheduling strategy is presented that considers not only the length of the remaining message in queue but also the original message length when it schedules packets. Simulation results indicate that substantial performance improvement in end-to-end message delay can be obtained without adversely affecting the network message throughput. No additional communication overhead is needed and the computational overhead is also not high.