A Packet Scheduling Approach to QoS Support in Multihop Wireless Networks

Providing packet-level quality of service (QoS) is critical to support both rate-sensitive and delay-sensitive applications in the bandwidth-constrained, shared-channel, multihop wireless networks. Packet scheduling has been a very popular paradigm to ensure minimum throughput and bounded delay access for packet flows. This work describes a packet scheduling approach to QoS provisioning in multihop wireless networks. Besides minimum throughput and delay bounds for each flow, our scheduling disciplines seek to achieve fair and maximum allocation of the shared wireless channel bandwidth. However, these two criteria can potentially be in conflict in a generic-topology multihop wireless network where a single logical channel is shared among multiple contending flows and spatial reuse of the channel bandwidth is possible. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling model that addresses this conflict. The main results of this paper are the following: (a) a two-tier service model that provides a minimum “fair” allocation of the channel bandwidth for each packet flow and additionally maximizes spatial reuse of bandwidth, (b) an ideal centralized packet scheduling algorithm that realizes the above service model, and (c) a practical distributed backoff-based channel contention mechanism that approximates the ideal service within the framework of the CSMA/CA protocol.