Link Scheduling in Local Interference Models

Choosing an appropriate interference model is crucial for link scheduling problems in sensor networks. While graph-based interference models allow for distributed and purely local coloring approaches which lead to many interesting results, a more realistic and widely agreed on model such as the signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) inherently makes scheduling radio transmission a non-local task, and thus impractical for the development of distributed and scalable scheduling protocols in sensor networks. In this work, we focus on interference models that are local in the sense that admissibility of transmissions only depends on local concurrent transmissions, and correct with respect to the geometric SINR model. In our analysis, we show lower bounds on the limitations that these restrictions impose an any such model as well as approximation results for greedy scheduling algorithms in a class of these models.