A Utility-Based Approach to Bandwidth Allocation and Link Scheduling in Wireless Networks

We study the problem of optimizing aggregate user utility in wireless ad-hoc networks under the constraints of wireless interference. We develop a market-oriented approach to bandwidth allocation with a tâtonnement process and demonstrate its ability to effectively price bottleneck resource. One novelty is that we choose to price “interference goods ” to capture the externality imposed by one application’s use of the network on other applications. In making progress we also propose a modification to the CSMA protocol that is robust enough to handle a non-schedulable bandwidth schedule. Experimental results on simulated network topologies show that the market-based approach has better scalability than alternate approximation methods and is much more efficient in terms of runtime