Section: New Results

Scaling Methods: Fluid Limits in Wireless Networks

Participant : Philippe Robert.

This is a collaboration with Amandine Veber (CMAP, École Polytechnique). The goal is to investigate the stability properties of wireless networks when the bandwidth allocated to a node is proportional to a function of its backlog: if a node of this network has $x$ requests to transmit, then it receives a fraction of the capacity proportional to $log(1+x)$, the logarithm of its current load. A fluid scaling analysis of such a network is presented. We have shown that the interaction of several time scales plays an important role in the evolution of such a system, in particular its coordinates may live on very different time and space scales. As a consequence, the associated stochastic processes turn out to have unusual scaling behaviors which give an interesting fairness property to this class of algorithms. A heavy traffic limit theorem for the invariant distribution has also been proved. A generalization to the resource sharing algorithm for which the $log$ function is replaced by an increasing function.