Providing Non-uniform Scheduling Guarantees in a Wireless Network

摘要

Significant research effort has been directed towards the design and performance analysis of imperfect scheduling policies for wireless networks. These imperfect schedulers are of interest despite being sub-optimal, as they allow for more tractable implementation at the expense of some loss in performance. However much of this prior work takes a uniform scaling approach to analyzing scheduling performance, whereby the performance of a scheduling policy is characterized in terms of a single scalar quantity, the efficiency- ratio. While suitable for characterizing worst-case performance, this approach limits one's ability to understand the different extents of performance degradation that may be experienced by different links in a network. Such an understanding is very valuable when average performance is of greater interest than the worst-case, or when certain links are more important than others. Furthermore, once one approaches scheduler design with non-uniform performance guarantees in mind, one finds that simple modifications to well-known scheduling algorithms can yield substantially improved non-uniform scaling results compared to the original algorithms. In this paper, we make a comprehensive case for adopting such an approach by presenting non-uniform scaling results for a set of algorithms that are variants of well-known algorithms from the class of maximal schedulers.