Opportunistic scheduling in large-scale wireless networks

In this paper, we consider a distributed one-hop wireless network with n pairs of transmitters and receivers. It is assumed that each transmitter/receiver node is only connected to k receiver/transmitter nodes which are defined as neighboring nodes. The channel between the neighboring nodes is assumed to be Rayleigh fading. The objective is to find the maximum achievable sum-rate of the network in the asymptotic case of n, k à ¿ à ¿. It is shown that the asymptotic throughput of the system scales as n log k/k. An opportunistic on-off scheduling is proposed and shown to be asymptotically throughput optimal.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (ITR grant CCR-0325401)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant W911NF-08-1-0238