14,239 research outputs found
Optimal scheduling in some multi-queue single-server systems
In this paper we address the problem of optimal scheduling in a multi-queue single-server (MQSS) model. The server visits N queues in an arbitrary manner. Each queue is visited for a random period of time whose duration is sampled in advance. At the end of a visit period, either all customers of the attended queue leave the system (variant I), or only customers that were present in the queue upon the arrival of the server leave the system (variant II). A scheduling policy is a rule that selects the next queue to be visited by the server. When the controller has no information on the state of the system, it is shown, under homogeneous arrival assumptions- , that a cyclic policy minimizes the expected number of customers in the system. When the controller knows the number of customers in each queue, it is shown that the so-called most customers first (MCF) policy minimizes, in the sense of strong stochastic ordering, the vector of the number of customers in each queue whose components are arranged in decreasing order. These results hold for variants I and II, and are obtained under fairly weak statistical assumptions. This model has potential applications in videotex and time division multiple access systems
Age-Optimal Updates of Multiple Information Flows
In this paper, we study an age of information minimization problem, where
multiple flows of update packets are sent over multiple servers to their
destinations. Two online scheduling policies are proposed. When the packet
generation and arrival times are synchronized across the flows, the proposed
policies are shown to be (near) optimal for minimizing any time-dependent,
symmetric, and non-decreasing penalty function of the ages of the flows over
time in a stochastic ordering sense
Achieving Optimal Throughput and Near-Optimal Asymptotic Delay Performance in Multi-Channel Wireless Networks with Low Complexity: A Practical Greedy Scheduling Policy
In this paper, we focus on the scheduling problem in multi-channel wireless
networks, e.g., the downlink of a single cell in fourth generation (4G)
OFDM-based cellular networks. Our goal is to design practical scheduling
policies that can achieve provably good performance in terms of both throughput
and delay, at a low complexity. While a class of -complexity
hybrid scheduling policies are recently developed to guarantee both
rate-function delay optimality (in the many-channel many-user asymptotic
regime) and throughput optimality (in the general non-asymptotic setting),
their practical complexity is typically high. To address this issue, we develop
a simple greedy policy called Delay-based Server-Side-Greedy (D-SSG) with a
\lower complexity , and rigorously prove that D-SSG not only achieves
throughput optimality, but also guarantees near-optimal asymptotic delay
performance. Specifically, we show that the rate-function attained by D-SSG for
any delay-violation threshold , is no smaller than the maximum achievable
rate-function by any scheduling policy for threshold . Thus, we are able
to achieve a reduction in complexity (from of the hybrid
policies to ) with a minimal drop in the delay performance. More
importantly, in practice, D-SSG generally has a substantially lower complexity
than the hybrid policies that typically have a large constant factor hidden in
the notation. Finally, we conduct numerical simulations to validate
our theoretical results in various scenarios. The simulation results show that
D-SSG not only guarantees a near-optimal rate-function, but also empirically is
virtually indistinguishable from delay-optimal policies.Comment: Accepted for publication by the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking,
February 2014. A preliminary version of this work was presented at IEEE
INFOCOM 2013, Turin, Italy, April 201
When Backpressure Meets Predictive Scheduling
Motivated by the increasing popularity of learning and predicting human user
behavior in communication and computing systems, in this paper, we investigate
the fundamental benefit of predictive scheduling, i.e., predicting and
pre-serving arrivals, in controlled queueing systems. Based on a lookahead
window prediction model, we first establish a novel equivalence between the
predictive queueing system with a \emph{fully-efficient} scheduling scheme and
an equivalent queueing system without prediction. This connection allows us to
analytically demonstrate that predictive scheduling necessarily improves system
delay performance and can drive it to zero with increasing prediction power. We
then propose the \textsf{Predictive Backpressure (PBP)} algorithm for achieving
optimal utility performance in such predictive systems. \textsf{PBP}
efficiently incorporates prediction into stochastic system control and avoids
the great complication due to the exponential state space growth in the
prediction window size. We show that \textsf{PBP} can achieve a utility
performance that is within of the optimal, for any ,
while guaranteeing that the system delay distribution is a
\emph{shifted-to-the-left} version of that under the original Backpressure
algorithm. Hence, the average packet delay under \textsf{PBP} is strictly
better than that under Backpressure, and vanishes with increasing prediction
window size. This implies that the resulting utility-delay tradeoff with
predictive scheduling beats the known optimal tradeoff for systems without prediction
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