A Green, Modular and Fair Packet Scheduler for Boosting Throughput over Wireless Links

We study the problem of defining and implementing a packet scheduler able to give the high performance of a wired packet scheduler over a wireless link, i.e. a low execution time with low power consumption, high QoS guarantees and high throughput. 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 little flexible and does not allow any of the existing high-quality schedulers for wired links to be used without modification. To address these issues, in this paper we validate a modular architecture which permits the use, as they are, of existing packet schedulers for wired links over wireless links, and at the same time allows the flexibility to adapt to different channel conditions. We validate the effectiveness of the modular architecture by showing, through experimental results, that this architecture enables us to get a new scheduler with the following features, just by combining existing schedulers: execution time and energy consumption close to that of just a Deficit Round Robin, accurate fairness and delay guarantees, possibility to set, by changing one parameter, the desired trade-off between throughput-boosting level and granularity of the service guarantees. In particular, we show that this scheduler, which we named High-throughput Twin Fair scheduler (HFS), outperforms one of the most accurate and efficient integrated schedulers available in the literature.