A New Paradigm for Shortest Link Scheduling in Wireless Networks: Theory and Applications

Shortest link scheduling (SLS) is one of the most fundamental problems in wireless networks. Almost all of the state-of-the-art approximation algorithms for SLS in wireless networks are resorted to the ellipsoid method for linear programming exclusively. However, the ellipsoid method can require an inordinate amount of running time and memory even for a moderate sized input, and consequently is often unusable in practice. This paper presents a completely new paradigm for SLS in general wireless networks which is radically different from the prevailing ellipsoid method, and is much faster and simpler. The broarder applicability of this new paradigm is demonstrated by its applications to SLS in wireless single-channel single-radio networks under the physical interference model, wireless multi-channel multi-radio networks under the protocol interference model, and wireless multi-input multi-output networks with receiver-side interference suppression under the protocol interference model.