Distributed Scheduling in Multihop Wireless Networks with Maxmin Fairness Provisioning

Fair allocation of resources is an important consideration in the design of wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the setting of multihop wireless networks with multiple routing paths and develop an online flow control and scheduling algorithm for packet admission and link activation that achieves high aggregate throughput while providing different data flows with a fair share of network capacity. For fairness provisioning, we seek to maximize the minimum throughput provided to flows in the network. To cope with different degrees of data reliability among the different links in the network, we use different channel code rates as appropriate. While we expect performance improvement using channel coding and multipath routing, the main contribution of our work is a joint treatment of network stability, multipath routing and link-level reliability in meeting the overarching goal of maxmin fairness. We develop a decentralized, and hence practical, scheduling policy that addresses various concerns and demonstrate, via simulations, that it is competitive with respect to an optimal centralized rate allocator. We also evaluate the fairness provisioning under the proposed algorithm and show that channel coding improves the performance of the network significantly. Finally, we show through simulations that the proposed algorithm outperforms a class of existing approaches on fairness provisioning, which are developed based on utility maximization.