Optimal and suboptimal packet scheduling over correlated time varying flat fading channels

We address the issue of optimal packet scheduling over correlated fading channels which trades off between minimization of three goals: average transmission power, average delay and average packet dropping probability. We show that the problem forms a weakly communicating Markov decision process and formulate the problem as both unconstrained and constrained problem. Relative value iteration (RVI) algorithm is used to find optimal deterministic policy for unconstrained problem, while optimal randomized policy for constrained problem is obtained using linear programming (LP) technique. Whereas with RVI only a finite number of scheduling policies can be obtained over the feasible delay region, LP can produce policies for all feasible delays with a fixed dropping probability and is computationally faster than the RVI. We show the structure of optimal deterministic policy in terms of the channel and buffer state and form a simple log functional suboptimal scheduler that approximately follows the optimal structure. Performance results are given for both constant and bursty Poisson arrivals, and the proposed suboptimal scheduler is compared with the optimal and channel threshold scheduler. Our suboptimal scheduler performs close to the optimal scheduler for every feasible delay and is robust to different channel parameters, number of actions and incoming traffic distributions.