Energy-Efficient Random-Access Scheduler for Delay-Limited Traffic in Wireless Networks

This paper considers energy minimization for a fast-fading random-access network, where each user sends a single fixed-length packet by selecting a single time-slot within a strict delay-limit. The proposed algorithms assume that each user causally knows its channel state information from electromagnetic reciprocity. With the channel distribution known to all users, the proposed dynamic-programming solution provides an optimal scheduler that minimizes the sum of energy used to transmit a packet and outage cost incurred by a packet drop. Without the knowledge of the channel distribution, a heuristic scheduler is additionally proposed, which learns channel statistics by observing initial time slots.