Distributed Call Scheduling in Wireless Networks

This work investigates distributed transmission scheduling in wireless networks. Due to interference constraints, "neighboring links'' cannot be simultaneously activated, otherwise transmissions will fail. Here, we consider any binary model of interference. We follow the model described by Bui, Sanghavi, and Srikant in SBS09,SBS07. We suppose that time is slotted and during each slot we have two phases: one control phase which determines what links will be activated and send data during the second phase. We assume random arrivals on each link during each slot, therefore a queue is associated to each link. Since nodes do not have a global knowledge of the network, our aim (like in SBS09,SBS07) is to design for the control phase, a distributed algorithm which determines a set of non interfering links. To be efficient the control phase should be as short as possible; this is done by exchanging control messages during a constant number of mini-slots (constant overhead). In this article we design the first fully distributed local algorithm with the following properties: it works for any arbitrary binary interference model; it has a constant overhead (independent of the size of the network and the values of the queues); and it needs no knowledge. Indeed contrary to other existing algorithms, we do not need to know the values of the queues of the "neighboring links'', which are difficult to obtain in a wireless network with interference. We prove that this algorithm gives a maximal set of active links (in each interference set, there is at least one active edge). We also give sufficient conditions for stability under Markovian assumptions. Finally the performance of our algorithm (throughput, stability) is investigated and compared via simulations to that of previously proposed schemes

Algorithms for Fast Aggregated Convergecast in Sensor Networks

Fast and periodic collection of aggregated data is of considerable interest for mission-critical and continuous monitoring applications in sensor networks. In the many-to-one communication paradigm, referred to as convergecast, we focus on applications wherein data packets are aggregated at each hop en-route to the sink along a tree-based routing topology, and address the problem of minimizing the convergecast schedule length by utilizing multiple frequency channels. The primary hindrance in minimizing the schedule length is the presence of interfering links. We prove that it is NP-complete to determine whether all the interfering links in an arbitrary network can be removed using at most a constant number of frequencies. We give a sufficient condition on the number of frequencies for which all the interfering links can be removed, and propose a polynomial time algorithm that minimizes the schedule length in this case. We also prove that minimizing the schedule length for a given number of frequencies on an arbitrary network is NP-complete, and describe a greedy scheme that gives a constant factor approximation on unit disk graphs. When the routing tree is not given as an input to the problem, we prove that a constant factor approximation is still achievable for degree-bounded trees. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms through simulations and compare their performance under different network parameters