A Low-Latency and High-Throughput Scheduler for Emergency and Wireless Networks

Providing QoS guarantees, boosting throughput and saving energy over wireless links is a challenging task, especially in emergency networks, where all of these features are crucial during a disaster event. A common solution is using a single, integrated scheduler that deals both with the QoS guarantees and the wireless link issues. Unfortunately, such an approach is not flexible and does not allow any of the existing high-quality schedulers for wired links to be used without modifications. We address these issues through a modular architecture which permits the use of existing packet schedulers for wired links over wireless links, as they are, and at the same time allows the flexibility to adapt to different channel conditions. We validate the effectiveness of our modular architecture by showing, through formal analysis as well as experimental results, that this architecture enables us to get a new scheduler with the following features, by just combining existing schedulers: execution time and energy consumption close to that of just a Deficit Round Robin, accurate fairness and low latency, possibility to set the desired trade-off between throughput-boosting level and granularity of service guarantees, by changing one parameter. In particular, we show that this scheduler, which we named Highthroughput Twin Fair scheduler (HFS), outperforms one of the most accurate and efficient integrated schedulers available in the literature.