Communication Complexity of Distributed Scheduling in Wireless Communication Networks

In wireless communication networks, it is important to schedule transmissions according to the different priorities of different data packets. Quite often, the scheduling is carried out in a distributed way and information exchange via wireless channels is necessary. The communication overhead of the distributed scheduling is studied, in terms of the number of communication bits needed for accomplishing the scheduling. The theory of communication complexity is applied to derive corresponding lower bounds in the special case of complete connection graph. Practical broadcast protocols are proposed to accomplish the distributed scheduling.