The Complexity of Connectivity in Wireless Networks

— We define and study the scheduling complexity in wireless networks, which expresses the theoretically achievable efficiency of MAC layer protocols. Given a set of communication requests in arbitrary networks, the scheduling complexity describes the amount of time required to successfully schedule all requests. The most basic and important network structure in wireless networks being connectivity, we study the scheduling complexity of connectivity, i.e., the minimal amount of time required until a connected structure can be scheduled. In this paper, we prove that the scheduling complexity of connectivity grows only polylogarithmically in the number of nodes. Specifically, we present a novel scheduling algorithm that successfully schedules a strongly connected set of links in time O(log4 n) even in arbitrary worst-case networks. On the other hand, we prove that standard MAC layer or scheduling protocols can perform much worse. Particularly, any protocol that either employs uniform...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Thomas Moscibroda, Roger Wattenhofer
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Scheduling Algorithm, Scheduling Complexity, Wireless Networks