8,019 research outputs found
Minimizing the Age of Information in Wireless Networks with Stochastic Arrivals
We consider a wireless network with a base station serving multiple traffic
streams to different destinations. Packets from each stream arrive to the base
station according to a stochastic process and are enqueued in a separate (per
stream) queue. The queueing discipline controls which packet within each queue
is available for transmission. The base station decides, at every time t, which
stream to serve to the corresponding destination. The goal of scheduling
decisions is to keep the information at the destinations fresh. Information
freshness is captured by the Age of Information (AoI) metric.
In this paper, we derive a lower bound on the AoI performance achievable by
any given network operating under any queueing discipline. Then, we consider
three common queueing disciplines and develop both an Optimal Stationary
Randomized policy and a Max-Weight policy under each discipline. Our approach
allows us to evaluate the combined impact of the stochastic arrivals, queueing
discipline and scheduling policy on AoI. We evaluate the AoI performance both
analytically and using simulations. Numerical results show that the performance
of the Max-Weight policy is close to the analytical lower bound
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
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
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