Link-Sharing Backpressure Routing In Wireless Multi-Hop Networks
Abstract
Backpressure (BP) routing and scheduling is an established resource allocation method for wireless multi-hop networks, noted for its fully distributed operation and maximum queue stability. Recent advances in shortest path-biased BP routing (SP-BP) mitigate shortcomings such as slow startup and random walks, yet exclusive link-level commodity selection still causes last-packet problem and bandwidth underutilization. By revisiting the Lyapunov drift theory underlying BP, we show that the legacy exclusive commodity selection is unnecessary, and propose a Maximum Utility (MaxU) link-sharing method to expand its performance envelope without increasing control message overhead. Numerical results show that MaxU SP-BP substantially mitigates the last-packet problem and slightly expands the network capacity region.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.09902,
title = {Link-Sharing Backpressure Routing In Wireless Multi-Hop Networks},
author = {Zhongyuan Zhao and Yujun Ming and Ananthram Swami and Kevin Chan and Fikadu Dagefu and Santiago Segarra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.09902},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE ICASSP 2026