Opportunistic transmission scheduling with resource-sharing constraints in wireless networks

We present an "opportunistic" transmission scheduling policy that exploits time-varying channel conditions and maximizes the system performance stochastically under a certain resource allocation constraint. We establish the optimality of the scheduling scheme and also that every user experiences a performance improvement over any nonopportunistic scheduling policy when users have independent performance values. We demonstrate via simulation results that the scheme is robust to estimation errors and also works well for nonstationary scenarios, resulting in performance improvements of 20%-150% compared with a scheduling scheme that does not take into account channel conditions. Last, we discuss an extension of our opportunistic scheduling scheme to improve "short-term" performance.