The usable throughput of an IEEE 802.11 system for an application is much less than the raw bandwidth. Although 802.11b has a theoretical maximum of 11 Mbps, more than half of the bandwidth is consumed by overhead leaving at most 5 Mbps of usable bandwidth. Considering this characteristic, this paper proposes and analyzes a real-time distributed scheduling scheme based on the existing IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks, using USC/ISI's Power Aware Sensing Tracking and Analysis (PASTA) hardware platform. We compared the distributed real-time scheduling scheme with the real-time polling scheme to meet deadline, and compared a measured real bandwidth with a theoretical result. The theoretical and experimental results show that the distributed scheduling scheme can guarantee real-time traffic and enhances the performance up to 74% compared with polling scheme.

This paper proposes a low power real-time packet scheduling scheme that reduces power consumption and network errors on wireless local area networks. The proposed scheme is based on the dynamic modulation scheme which can scale the number of bits per symbol when time slots are unused, and the reclaiming scheme which can switch the primary polling schedule when a specific station falls into a bad state. Built on top of the EDF scheduling policy, the proposed scheme enhances the power performance without violating the constraints of subsequent real-time streams. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances success ratio and reduces power consumption.