Deadline constrained packet scheduling for wireless networks

Third generation (3G) of wireless communication networks aim to provide quality-of-service (QoS) sensitive services to downlink users. Amongst these are real-time multimedia services like video-conferencing and live media streaming, where the packets to be delivered to the user have deadlines associated with them. Downlink packet scheduling plays a key role in efficiently allocating base station resources to meet the desired level of QoS for various users. In this paper, we study the design of a downlink wireless packet scheduler that is capable of supporting applications with packet deadlines. We use a dynamic programming (DP) approach to study a parsimonious model of the scheduling problem. We propose a heuristic scheduling policy based on the structural properties of the optimal solution to the DP. We contrast the performance of the proposed scheduler to that of standard benchmark schedulers via extensive link-level simulations. The proposed scheduler offers a significantly better trade-off between user fairness and system performance.