A Generic Quantitative Approach to the Scheduling of Synchronous Packets in a Shared Uplink Wireless Channel

The scheduling logic at the base station of a shared wireless medium supports time-dependent (synchronous) applications by allocating timely transmission grants. To this end, it must take into account not only the deadlines of the pending packets, but also the channel conditions for each potential sender, the requirements of nonsynchronous applications, and the packet retransmission strategy. With respect to these factors, we identify three scheduling scenarios and show that the scheduler logic faces a different challenge in addressing each of them. We then present a generic scheduling algorithm that translates all the factors relevant to each scenario into a common profit parameter, and selects the most profitable transmission instances.