On Scheduling for Minimizing End-to-End Buffer Usage over Multihop Wireless Networks

—While there has been much progress in designing backpressure based stabilizing algorithms for multihop wireless networks, end-to-end performance (e.g., end-to-end buffer usage) results have not been as forthcoming. In this paper, we study the end-to-end buffer usage (sum of buffer utilization along a flow path) over a network with general topology and with fixed, loopfree routes using a large-deviations approach. We first derive bounds on the best performance that any scheduling algorithm can achieve. Based on the intuition from the bounds, we propose a class of (backpressure-like) scheduling algorithms called αβalgorithms. We show that the parameters α and β can be chosen such that the system under the αβ-algorithm performs arbitrarily closely to the best possible scheduler (formally the decay rate function for end-to-end buffer overflow is shown to be arbitrarily close to optimal in the large-buffer regime). We also develop variants which have the same asymptotic optimal...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: V. J. Venkataramanan, Xiaojun Lin, Lei Ying, Sanjay Shakkottai
• Keywords: Algorithms, Communications, End-to-end Buffer, End-to-end Buffer Usage, INFOCOM 2010