Survivability in Wireless Networks: A Case for Overhead Reduction

A link scheduling model is presented that utilizes primary-backup scheduling for packet scheduling. The advantage of this scheduling paradigm is that overhead can be suppressed in the fault-free case and overhead only needs to be endured in case of actual faults. The scheduling paradigm significantly increases survivability and can be used to reduce overhead of redundancybased approaches. The foundation for using primarybackup scheduling in networks is derived. The schemes presented are very effective for multi-path protocols and MIMO and can be applied where watchdog-based algorithms fail or where geographic-centric disruptions render local approaches useless.