Scheduling of Multicast and Unicast Services under Limited Feedback by using Rateless Codes

Many opportunistic scheduling techniques are impractical because they require accurate channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. In this paper, we investigate the scheduling of unicast and multicast services in a downlink network with a very limited amount of feedback information. Specifically, unicast users send imperfect (or no) CSI and infrequent acknowledgements (ACKs) to a base station, and multicast users only report infrequent ACKs to avoid feedback implosion. We consider the use of physical-layer rateless codes, which not only combats channel uncertainty, but also reduces the overhead of ACK feedback. A joint scheduling and power allocation scheme is developed to realize multiuser diversity gain for unicast service and multicast gain for multicast service. We prove that our scheme achieves a near-optimal throughput region. Our simulation results show that our scheme significantly improves the network throughput over schemes employing fixed-rate codes or using only unicast communications

Distributive Stochastic Learning for Delay-Optimal OFDMA Power and Subband Allocation

In this paper, we consider the distributive queue-aware power and subband allocation design for a delay-optimal OFDMA uplink system with one base station, $K$ users and $N_F$ independent subbands. Each mobile has an uplink queue with heterogeneous packet arrivals and delay requirements. We model the problem as an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Problem (MDP) where the control actions are functions of the instantaneous Channel State Information (CSI) as well as the joint Queue State Information (QSI). To address the distributive requirement and the issue of exponential memory requirement and computational complexity, we approximate the subband allocation Q-factor by the sum of the per-user subband allocation Q-factor and derive a distributive online stochastic learning algorithm to estimate the per-user Q-factor and the Lagrange multipliers (LM) simultaneously and determine the control actions using an auction mechanism. We show that under the proposed auction mechanism, the distributive online learning converges almost surely (with probability 1). For illustration, we apply the proposed distributive stochastic learning framework to an application example with exponential packet size distribution. We show that the delay-optimal power control has the {\em multi-level water-filling} structure where the CSI determines the instantaneous power allocation and the QSI determines the water-level. The proposed algorithm has linear signaling overhead and computational complexity $\mathcal O(KN)$, which is desirable from an implementation perspective.Comment: To appear in Transactions on Signal Processin

Dynamic Server Allocation over Time Varying Channels with Switchover Delay

We consider a dynamic server allocation problem over parallel queues with randomly varying connectivity and server switchover delay between the queues. At each time slot the server decides either to stay with the current queue or switch to another queue based on the current connectivity and the queue length information. Switchover delay occurs in many telecommunications applications and is a new modeling component of this problem that has not been previously addressed. We show that the simultaneous presence of randomly varying connectivity and switchover delay changes the system stability region and the structure of optimal policies. In the first part of the paper, we consider a system of two parallel queues, and develop a novel approach to explicitly characterize the stability region of the system using state-action frequencies which are stationary solutions to a Markov Decision Process (MDP) formulation. We then develop a frame-based dynamic control (FBDC) policy, based on the state-action frequencies, and show that it is throughput-optimal asymptotically in the frame length. The FBDC policy is applicable to a broad class of network control systems and provides a new framework for developing throughput-optimal network control policies using state-action frequencies. Furthermore, we develop simple Myopic policies that provably achieve more than 90% of the stability region. In the second part of the paper, we extend our results to systems with an arbitrary but finite number of queues.Comment: 38 Pages, 18 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1008.234