Complexity in Wireless Scheduling: Impacts and Trade-offs

It has been an important research topic since 1992 to maximize stability region in constrained queueing systems, which includes the study of scheduling over wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a framework to study a wide range of existing and future scheduling algorithms and characterize the achieved tradeoffs in stability, delay, and complexity. These characterizations reveal interesting properties hidden in the study of any one or two dimensions in isolation. For example, decreasing complexity from exponential to polynomial, while keeping stability region the same, generally comes at the expense of exponential growth of delays. Investigating trade-offs in the 3-dimensional space allows a designer to fix one dimension and vary the other two jointly. For example, incentives for using scheduling algorithms with only partial throughput-guarantee can be quantified with regards to delay and complexity. Tradeoff analysis is then extended to systems with congestion control through utility maximization for non-stabilizable arrival inputs, where the complexity-utility-delay trade-off is shown to be different from the complexity-stability-delay tradeoff. Finally, we analyze more practical models with bounded message size, and consider “effective throughput” which reflects resource occupied by control messages. We show that effective throughput may degrade significantly in certain scheduling algorithms, and suggest a mechanism to avoid this problem in light of the 3D tradeoff framework.