Distributed Opportunistic Scheduling: A Control Theoretic Approach

October 3, 2012
Albert Banchs | University Carlos III

Distributed Opportunistic Scheduling (DOS) techniques have been recently proposed to improve the throughput performance of wireless networks. With DOS, each station contends for the channel with a certain access probability. If a contention is successful, the station measures the channel conditions and transmits in case the channel quality is above a certain threshold. Otherwise, the station does not use the transmission opportunity, allowing all stations to recontend. A key challenge with DOS is to design a distributed algorithm that optimally adjusts the access probability and the threshold of each station. To address this challenge, in this paper we first compute the configuration of these two parameters that jointly optimizes throughput performance in terms of proportional fairness. Then, we propose an adaptive algorithm based on control theory that converges to the desired point of operation. Finally, we conduct a control theoretic analysis of the algorithm to find a setting for its parameters that provides a good tradeoff between stability and speed of convergence. Simulation results validate the design of the proposed algorithm and confirm its advantages over previous proposals.

Speaker Details

Albert Banchs received his degree in telecommunications engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 1997, and his Ph.D. degree from the same university in 2002. He received a national award for the best Ph.D. thesis on broadband networks. He was a visiting researcher at ICSI, Berkeley, in 1997, worked for Telefonica I+D, Spain, in 1998, and for NEC Europe Ltd., Germany, from 1998 to 2003. He has been with the University Carlos III of Madrid since 2003. Since 2009, he also has a double affiliation as Deputy Director of the institute IMDEA Networks. Albert Banchs has authored over 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and holds six patents. He is senior editor for IEEE Communications Letters, area editor for Computer Communications and has been guest editor for IEEE Wireless Communications, Computer Networks and Computer Communications. He has served on the TPC of a number of conferences and workshops including IEEE Infocom, ITC and IEEE WCNC among others, and has been TPC chair for European Wireless 2010, IEEE HotMESH 2010 and IEEE WoWMoM 2012. He is senior member of IEEE.