Impact of Size-Based Scheduling on Flow Level Performance in Wireless Downlink Data Channels

We analyze the impact of size-based scheduling on the flow level performance of elastic traffic in wireless downlink data channels. The impact is assessed by comparing the flow level delay of the simple RR scheduler to two optimized non-anticipating schedulers (FB and FB◦) and SRPT. The optimized distance-aware scheduler FB◦ is derived by applying the Gittins index approach. Our results show that for Paretotype file size distributions, the size-based information is more important than the location information. Additionally, FB not only decreases the overall mean delay, but it can also decrease considerably the mean delay of all users independently of their location.