Leveraging medium contention for distributed channel time scheduling in wireless networks

Abstract

We consider the distributed scheduling problem in a wireless multiple access communication network system that requires no coordinator or access point. In many WLAN / WPAN standards, the coordinator in the infrastructure mode is used to provide contention free access to support Quality of Service (QoS) of certain applications (e.g., audio/video streaming). In the absence of a coordinator, contention-free channel time reservation is very challenging. Existing solutions use announcement or information exchange among stations to negotiate/reserve the use of the medium. In this paper, we propose a method to perform distributed contention-free reservation incurring no messaging overhead or any explicit information exchange. The key is for stations to leverage the medium contention results for the purpose of scheduling / reserving channel time for future transmissions. The proposed solution is simple, lightweight and effective. It can be readily incorporated in most conventional WLAN/WPAN standards.