Channel-Aware Earliest Deadline Due Fair Scheduling for Wireless Multimedia Networks

Providing delay guarantees to time-sensitive traffic in wireless multimedia networks is a challenging issue. This is due to the time-varying link capacities and the variety of real-time applications expected to be handled by such networks. We propose and evaluate the performance of a channel-aware scheduling discipline and a set of policies that are capable of providing such delay guarantees in TDM-based wireless networks. First, we introduce the Channel-Dependent Earliest-Due-Date (CD-EDD) discipline. In this discipline, the expiration time of the head of line packets of users’ queues is taken into consideration in conjunction with the current channel states of users in the scheduling decision. This scheme attempts to guarantee the targeted delay bounds in addition to exploiting multiuser diversity to make best utilization of the variable capacity of the channel. We also propose the violation-fair policy that can be integrated with the CD-EDD discipline and two other well-known scheduling disciplines [1, 2]. In this policy, we attempt to ensure that the number of packets dropped due to deadline violation is fairly distributed among the users. The proposed schemes can provide statistical guarantees on delays, achieve high throughput, and exhibit good fairness performance with respect to throughput and deadline violations. We provide extensive simulation results to study the performance the proposed schemes and compare them with two of the best known scheduling disciplines [1, 2] in the literature.