Throughput performance of back-pressure scheduling in wireless cooperative networks

It is well-known that throughput of wired multi-hop, multi-commodity networks can be maximized by employing back-pressure scheduling. With this approach, packets belonging to different destinations are dynamically routed/scheduled in a network based on buffer occupancies and link quality. There has been a considerable amount of research on applying back-pressure scheduling in the wireless environment; usually by abstracting each wireless channel as a point-to-point link and therefore, ignoring the fundamental wireless broadcast property. In this paper, we consider a two-hop wireless cooperative network and characterize the minimum throughput gain obtained by exploiting broadcast property in back-pressure scheduling. Numerical results are provided to support our analysis.