Back-Pressure Routing and Optimal Scheduling in Wireless Broadcast Networks

This paper considers the joint routing and scheduling problem in wireless networks with lossy channels. In order to combat channel loss, packets are assumed to be transmitted by nodes using broadcast, instead of traditional point-to-point communication. We first analyze the network capacity region, and then propose a back-pressure routing with max-weight scheduling algorithm to achieve it. The proposed algorithm is a generalization of the algorithm proposed by Tassiulas to wireless broadcast networks. Further, we propose a random low complexity scheduling algorithm which, combined with backpressure routing, also achieves the same capacity region. Both stability results are proved by the method of fluid limits.