Utilization-Based Dynamic Scheduling Algorithm for Wireless Mesh Networks

Channel access scheduling is one of the key components in the design of multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). This paper addresses the allocation/demand mismatch problem observed in oblivious WMN channel access scheduling schemes and proposes Utilization-Based Scheduling (UBS). UBS is a Spatial-TDMA- (STDMA-) based dynamic channel access scheduling scheme designed with the aim of increasing the application-level throughput. In UBS, each node has a weight, which is dynamically adjusted in accordance with the node's slot usage history and packet-queue occupancy. UBS is a fully distributed algorithm, where each node adjusts its own weight and makes pseudorandom transmission attempts using only the locally available information. To demonstrate the performance improvements of the dynamic weight adjustment, the performance of UBS is compared against other channel access scheduling schemes through extensive ns-2 simulations under both uniform and nonuniform traffic patterns.