Transmission Scheduling with Deadline and Throughput Constraints

Today wireless networks are increasingly used to perform applications with Quality of Service constraints (QoS) such as delay, delivery ratio, and channel reliability. Especially, as demand for real-time transmissions increases, transmitting packets with hard delivery deadlines poses an important network control problem. In this thesis, we propose a framework for characterizing feasibility regions and finding an optimal scheduling policy in various wireless networks. First, we start with a wireless network with multiple unicast flows. We investigate how delay in feedback information decreases the feasibility region. Second, we consider time-varying channels and how delay in network state information decreases the feasibility region. Third, we characterize the feasibility region of a wireless network with multiple multicast flows. In each case, we characterize the feasibility region, prove that a max-weight policy is a feasibility optimal policy and present the results of simulation studies verifying the theoretical studies. Thesis Supervisor: Eytan Modiano Title: Professor, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics