Scheduling Issues in Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

Scheduling decisions can have a pronounced impact on the performance of multi-radio wireless systems. In this paper, we study the effects of dispatch policies and queue scheduling strategies on the user-perceived performance for Internet traffic flows in a multi-channel WLAN. Our work is carried out using simulation and an empirical Web workload trace, with mean response time as the primary performance metric. The simulation results demonstrate the good/bad combination of the dispatch policy with queue scheduling strategy, the advantages of deferred dispatch over immediate dispatch, and the sensitivity of dispatch policies to heavy-tailed workload characteristics. The results also highlight the pros and cons of a simple lookahead scheduling policy, particularly in the presence of high variability workloads on a heterogeneous multi-channel system with random losses. Our results provide insights into efficient and robust scheduling policies for multi-channel WLANs.