Distributed Opportunistic Packet Scheduling Policy in Wireless LANs

Due to the fluctuations of wireless channels, we can use opportunistic scheduling to exploit multiuser diversity. The conventional opportunistic scheduling is not applied to wireless LANs due to the absence of channel report function. In this paper, we propose a distributed opportunistic scheduling scheme for wireless LAN networks without incurring large overhead of channel probing. A proportional fair scheduling, which is one of the opportunistic scheduling schemes, is used for centralized networks, whereas we design distributed proportional fair scheduling (DPFS) scheme and medium access control in distributed manner. We compare the performance of the DPFS with conventional packet scheduling through computer simulation. Simulation results shows the proposed DPFS can achieve higher throughput than conventional scheduling while maintaining fairness among receivers.