A Self-Coordinating Approach to Distributed Fair Queueing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Distributed fair queueing in shared-medium ad hoc wireless networks is non-trivial because of the unique design challenges in such networks, such as location-dependent contention, distributed nature of ad hoc fair queueing, channel spatial reuse, and scalability in the presence of node mobility. In this paper, we seek to devise new distributed, localized, scalable and efficient solutions to this problem. We first analyze an ideal centralized fair queueing algorithm developed for ad hoc networks, and extract the desired global properties that the localized algorithms should possess. We then propose three localized fair queueing models, in which local schedulers self-coordinate their local interactions and collectively achieve the desired global properties. We further describe a novel implementation of the proposed models within the framework of the popular CSMA/CA paradigm and address several practical issues. Our simulations and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed design.