Performance of multihop latency aware scheduling in delay constrained ad hoc networks

This paper addresses the problem of optimizing packet transmission schedule at the Medium Access Control layer of an ad hoc network, in order to minimize the probability of packet loss due to excessive end-to-end delay. We study a family of Multihop Latency Aware (MLA) schedules, where the scheduling of each packet takes into account its remaining hop count and remaining lifetime. We propose a numerical analysis framework to evaluate the performance of MLA scheduling. Using the proposed analysis framework, we study the optimization of MLA parameters to minimize packet loss probability. We show that the MLA scheme significantly out performs other scheduling schemes such as First-In-First-Out, Earliest-Deadline-First, and Largest-Distance-First.