Opportunistic Scheduling in Ferry-Based Networks

Ferry-based networks provide a means of bringing extremely low-cost Internet access to remote rural areas, where conventional access technologies, e.g., dial-up, DSL and CDMA, are currently economically infeasible. We present an architecture for ferry-based networks and identify downlink scheduling as a difficult open problem. We argue that opportunistic scheduling policies that take ferry schedules into account are more suitable for such networks than the non-opportunistic policies such as round-robin. We then, for a simplified variant of the problem, propose an opportunistic scheduling algorithm aimed at minimizing the end-to-end delay incurred in the network. Through simulations, we show that the proposed opportunistic scheduling algorithm outperforms the non-opportunistic algorithms in reducing end-to-end delay while achieving a larger stability region. In typical scenarios we see a gain of up to 20% using our technique as compared to a naive approach.