Look who's talking: a practical approach for achieving scheduled wifi in a single collision domain

Abstract

We ask the following question in this paper: Can the goals of centralized WiFi scheduling be achieved using purely distributed operations? We present a solution called Look Who's Talking (LWT) that allows for arbitrary schedules to be distributed to nodes in a WiFi network. The nodes in the network then use purely local and distributed operations to achieve the prescribed schedule. The scope of LWT in this paper is restricted to a single collision domain (single or multiple cells), but we discuss how LWT can be extended to multiple collision domains. We use both experimental evaluations (using a WARP-based testbed) and simulation-based analysis (using ns3) to evaluate LWT.