A proportional fairness scheduling for wireless sensor networks

This paper describes a packet scheduling algorithm for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that meets the proportional fairness principle. Based on the weighted round-robin strategy, the proposed scheduling algorithm allocates a different service quota to different traffic according to the average packet arrival rate. This guarantees proportional fairness in terms of the average packet delivery delay and the average packet loss ratio. Since the scheduling algorithm does not perform high-load operations such as time stamping and sorting, it can be implemented easily and is suitable for resource-limited WSNs. The proposed scheduling algorithm is tested in a WSN and is found to guarantee the proportional fairness of the average packet delivery delay when this is used as the performance metric, and to realize proportional fairness in the average packet loss ratio when all the queues are overflowing and the average packet loss ratio is used as the performance metric.