Optimal Transmission Scheduling for Two-Hop Networks

This paper studies the sensor and relay transmission scheduling problem for two-hop networks, where the objective is to trade off the performance of the remote state estimator and the energy consumption of the sensor and relay. To obtain the optimal scheduling, a Markov decision process with consideration of the joint state of the two-hop channels is constructed, then on this basis, it is proven that the optimal scheduling exists and has an easy-to-implement threshold structure. Compared with the existing works, the proposed scheduling can be applied to more general two-hop networks with time-varying channels. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling.