An Analytical Performance Evaluation Tool for Wireless Access Points with Opportunistic Scheduling

This paper introduces a performance analysis tool for a wireless access point which serves multiple mobile nodes. The wireless channel conditions vary over time and the opportunistic scheduler in the access point can account for the channel conditions as well as for the number of backlogged packets for the different mobile nodes. The tool is designed to allow for fast and accurate calculations of the main performance measures of the system. The calculation method is based on a Maclaurin series expansion of the stationary solution of the Markov process that describes the channel conditions and the queue contents for the different mobile nodes. The Maclaurin series expansion only requires the inversion of sparse block triangular matrices, which is considerably faster than directly calculating the stationary solution. The tool provides a user interface for defining the network and channel parameters and can be easily used for assessing the efficiency of opportunistic schedulers, or for optimizing system parameters and scheduling policies of such schedulers.