Opportunistic Scheduling with QoS Requirements in Time-varying Wireless Channels

In this paper, we present a framework for “opportunistic scheduling” that exploits the variation of the wireless channel conditions to improve spectrum efficiency. The objective of the scheduling schemes in this paper is to maximize the system performance in an opportunistic fashion, while satisfying various QoS requirements. We study three types of QoS requirements: the first is fairness in resource sharing, the second is a performance-based fairness requirement, and the third is that each user has a minimumperformance requirement. We provide optimal solutions, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different scheduling schemes. We also demonstrate via simulation that the schemes result in significant performance improvement compared with scheduling schemes that are not opportunistic. Keywords— Scheduling, wireless, resource allocation, time-varying channel, time-slotted system.