On asynchronous flow scheduling for wireless body sensor networks

Traditional distributed flow scheduling for wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) is designed based on perfect control channels where the instantaneous control information from the neighbors is available. However, in practice it is very difficult, sometimes even impossible, to obtain this information especially for dynamic WBSNs. This motivates us in this paper to study the distributed flow scheduling with heterogeneous delayed control information (DCI). First, we translate this scheduling problem into a stochastic optimization problem that opens up a new methodology to exploit in a tractable framework. Subsequently, we investigate the relationship between the DCI and scheduling performance, and derive a general performance property bound for any distributed scheduling. Importantly, a class of asynchronous flow scheduling scheme is proposed to achieve the performance bound by making use of the correlation among the time-scale control information.