Beyond interference avoidance: Distributed sub-network scheduling in wireless networks with local views

Pedro E. Santacruz, Vaneet Aggarwal, Ashutosh Sabharwal

Abstract: In most wireless networks, nodes have only limited local information about the network state, which includes connectivity and channel state information. With limited local information about the network, each node's knowledge is mismatched, therefore they must make distributed decisions. In this paper, we pose the following question - if every node has network state information only about a small neighborhood, how and when should nodes choose to transmit? While scheduling answers the above question for point-to-point physical layers which are designed for an interference-avoidance paradigm, we look for answers in cases when interference can be embraced by advanced code design, as suggested by results in network information theory. To make progress on this challenging problem, we propose a distributed algorithm which achieves rates higher than interference-avoidance based link scheduling, especially if each node knows more than one hop of network state information.