Optimal Scheduling for Fair Resource Allocation in Ad Hoc Networks with Elastic and Inelastic Traffic

This paper studies the problem of congestion control and scheduling in ad hoc wireless networks that have to support a mixture of best-effort and real-time traffic. Optimization and stochastic network theory have been successful in designing architectures for fair resource allocation to meet long-term throughput demands. However, to the best of our knowledge, strict packet delay deadlines were not considered in this framework previously. In this paper, we propose a model for incorporating the quality of service (QoS) requirements of packets with deadlines in the optimization framework. The solution to the problem results in a joint congestion control and scheduling algorithm which fairly allocates resources to meet the fairness objectives of both elastic and inelastic flows, and per-packet delay requirements of inelastic flows.