Fairness and high-throughput scheduling for multihop wireless ad hoc networks

In multihop wireless ad hoc networks, it is important to maintain the outcome fairness of throughput and to maximize the throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel opportunistic scheduling framework by considering outcome fairness and throughput simultaneously. Since the data rate fluctuates intensively due to channel errors, we first devise a data rate estimation method with an adaptive sliding window to accurately and adaptively estimate the data rate. Then, we present a framework together with two mechanisms. The first proposed mechanism is ROSA-WOM, with the weighted objective function method to configure the data rate. The other one is ROSA-MGCF, and it is a maximum total goodput method under a constrained fairness index. The proposed mechanisms are able to schedule the flows fairly even when the data rate of all flows is more than the channel capacity. We establish a testbed to evaluate these two mechanisms. The experiment results show that our proposed mechanisms can not only trade off with different fairness and throughput requirements, but also effectively provide robust service isolation, outcome fairness, and high throughput in the presence of channel errors. © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.