A centralized wireless system is considered that is serving a fixed set of
users with time varying channel capacities. An opportunistic scheduling rule in
this context selects a user (or users) to serve based on the current channel
state and user queues. Unless the user traffic is symmetric and/or the
underlying capacity region a polymatroid, little is known concerning how
performance optimal schedulers should tradeoff "maximizing current service
rate" (being opportunistic) versus "balancing unequal queues" (enhancing
user-diversity to enable future high service rate opportunities). By contrast
with currently proposed opportunistic schedulers, e.g., MaxWeight and Exp Rule,
a radial sum-rate monotone (RSM) scheduler de-emphasizes queue-balancing in
favor of greedily maximizing the system service rate as the queue-lengths are
scaled up linearly. In this paper it is shown that an RSM opportunistic
scheduler, p-Log Rule, is not only throughput-optimal, but also maximizes the
asymptotic exponential decay rate of the sum-queue distribution for a two-queue
system. The result complements existing optimality results for opportunistic
scheduling and point to RSM schedulers as a good design choice given the need
for robustness in wireless systems with both heterogeneity and high degree of
uncertainty.Comment: Revised version. Major changes include addition of
details/intermediate steps in various proofs, a summary of technical steps in
Table 1, and correction of typos