A Clustering Approach to Wireless Scheduling

Scheduling is an important task for interference avoidance and for quality-of-service provisioning in dense wireless networks. While most existing works frame the scheduling task as an optimization problem, due to the non-convex structure of the problem, the existing solutions can reach local optima only and tend to have high computational complexity. This paper explores an alternative perspective to scheduling. Recognizing the importance of interference management, we experiment with the use of various clustering techniques for the scheduling task in a wireless device-to-device (D2D) network. Specifically, we construct a representation of interference in the wireless network, form clusters of highly interfering D2D links, then schedule only one link in each cluster. We compare different clustering strategies and show the promising potential of very low complexity scheduling algorithms based on this clustering approach to the wireless link scheduling problem.