Performance analysis of a distributed algorithm for admission control in wireless networks under the $2$-hop interference model

Abstract: A general open problem in networking is: what are the fundamental limits to the performance that is achievable with some given amount of resources? More specifically, if each node in the network has information about only its $1$-hop neighborhood, then what are the limits to performance? This problem is considered for wireless networks where each communication link has a minimum bandwidth quality-of-service (QoS) requirement. Links in the same vicinity contend for the shared wireless medium. The conflict graph captures which pairs of links interfere with each other and depends on the MAC protocol. In IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol-based networks, when communication between nodes $i$ and $j$ takes place, the neighbors of both $i$ and $j$ remain silent. This model of interference is called the $2$-hop interference model because the distance in the network graph between any two links that can be simultaneously active is at least $2$. In the admission control problem, the objective is to determine, using only localized information, whether a given set of flow rates is feasible. In the present work, a distributed algorithm is proposed for this problem, where each node has information only about its $1$-hop neighborhood. The worst-case performance of the distributed algorithm, i.e. the largest factor by which the performance of this distributed algorithm is away from that of an optimal, centralized algorithm, is analyzed. Lower and upper bounds on the suboptimality of the distributed algorithm are obtained, and both bounds are shown to be tight. The exact worst-case performance is obtained for some ring topologies. While distance-$d$ distributed algorithms have been analyzed for the $1$-hop interference model, an open problem in the literature is to extend these results to the $K$-hop interference model, and the present work initiates the generalization to the $K$-hop interference model.