On the performance of largest-deficit-first for scheduling real-time traffic in wireless networks

This paper considers the problem of scheduling real-time traffic in wireless networks. We consider an ad hoc wireless network with general interference and general one-hop traffic. Each packet is associated with a deadline and will be dropped if it is not transmitted before the deadline expires. The number of packet arrivals in each time slot and the length of a deadline are both stochastic and follow certain distributions. We only allow a fraction of packets to be dropped. At each link, we assume the link keeps track of the difference between the minimum number of packets that need to be delivered and the number of packets that are actually delivered, which we call deficit. The largest-deficit-first (LDF) policy schedules links in descending order according to their deficit values, which is a variation of the largest-queue-first (LQF) policy for non-real-time traffic. We prove that the efficiency ratio of LDF can be lower bounded by a quantity that we call the real-time local-pooling factor (R-LPF). We further prove that given a network with interference degree β, the R-LPF is at least 1/(β + 1), which in the case of the one-hop interference model translates into an R-LPF of at least 1/3.