Performance Enhancement using Opportunistic Schedulers in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Maximizing system performance under various Quality of Service (QoS) constraints to cope with the rapidly growing demand of wireless applications is emerging as one of the important goals of future wireless networks. An obvious way to improve the performance is by incorporating appropriate scheduling mechanism in such networks. Although, scheduling has been extensively studied in different disciplines like operations research and wire-line networking, the unique characteristics of wireless networks, namely the time varying channel conditions and multi-user diversity necessitate the development of new scheduling solutions. Consequently, designing scheduling mechanisms that take advantage of time-varying channel conditions, is necessary to improve system performance. However, this has to be done in such a way as to ensure some level of fairness among the users. One such scheduling mechanism termed opportunistic scheduling is investigated in this paper. An attempt is made to maximize system throughput while satisfying the QoS metric, user temporal fairness. A performance comparison is made with the existing non—opportunistic scheduling schemes and the results are presented.

Indexing terms:

• Schedulers
• QoS provisioning
• TDMA systems

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K Jayanthi

K Jayanthi received BE degree from University of Madras in 1997 and MTech degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Pondicherry University in 1999. She has seven years of experience in teaching and research. She is currently serving as senior lecturer in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Pondicherry Engineering College, Pondicherry. She is also pursuing her research in the area of Wireless Communication Networks. She has also presented papers in 12 conferences at both national and international level. Her other areas of interest includes satellite communication and wireless multimedia networks.

K Varadharajan

V Varadharajan obtained his BTech degrees in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Pondicherry Engineering College in April 2005. Currently, he is with Satyam softwares. His area of interest include Signal processing and Computer communications.

A Arunkumar

A Arun Kumar obtained his BTech degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Pondicherry Engineering College in April 2005. Currently, he is with Satyam softwares. His area of interest includes Signal processing and Computer communications.

P Dananjayan

P Dananjayan received BSc degree in physics from University of Madras, in 1979, BTech and MTech degrees from Madras Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1984 respectively and PhD degree from Anna University, Chennai in 1998. He has 22 years of experience in teaching/research. He is currently working as professor and head in the Department of Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, Pondicherry Engineering College, Pondicherry. He has around twenty two publications in National and International Journals. He has presented papers in more than 80 National and International conferences. He has also authored two books titled Electromagnetic Engineering and Electromagnetic Waves and Waveguides. He is currently supervising seven research scholars. His areas of interests include ATM networks, Wireless Communications, Spread Spectrum techniques and Power electronics.