Transmission Scheduling for Efficient Wireless Network Utilization

Xin Liu, Edwin K. P. Chong, Ness B. Shroff

Abstract: We present an "opportunistic" transmission scheduling policy that exploits time-varying channel conditions and maximizes the system performance stochastically under a certain resource allocation fairness constraint. We establish the optimality of the scheduling scheme and also describe a practical scheduling procedure to implement our scheme. Through simulation results, we show that the scheme also works well for nonstationary scenarios and results in performance improvements of 20-150% compared with a scheduling scheme that does not take into account channel conditions. Furthermore, we note that in wireless networks, an important role of resource allocation is to balance the system performance and fairness among "good" and "bad" users. We propose three heuristic time-fraction assignment schemes, which approach the problem from different viewpoints.