A Proportional Fairness Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

A packet scheduling algorithm used for wireless sensor network meeting the proportional fairness principle is proposed. Based on the weighted round robin (WRR) strategy, the proposed scheduling algorithm allocates different service quota to different traffics according to their average packet arrival rates to guarantee the proportion fairness on the average packet delivery delay and the average packet loss ratio. Since the scheduling algorithm does not perform the high-load operations such as adding time stamps, sorting and so on, it can be implemented easily and is suitable for resource-limited WSN. The proposed algorithm is tested in a wireless sensor network. The performance shows that the scheduling algorithm can guarantee the average packet delivery delay proportional fairness when the average packet delivery delay is used as the performance metric and the average packet loss ratio proportional fairness is realized when all the queues are overflowing and the average packet loss ratio is used as the performance metric.