The scheduling problem in wireless networks

We describe the fundamental issue of scheduling the allocation of wireless network resources and provide several formulations of the associated problems. The emphasis is on scheduling transmission attempts. We place this problem in the context of existing approaches, like information theoretic and traditional network theoretic ones, as well as novel avenues that open up the possibility of addressing this issue for non-stationary and non-ergodic environments. We summarize concrete recent results for specific special cases that include unicast and multicast traffic, different objective functions, and reduced complexity versions of the problem. We conclude with some thoughts for future work. We identify and single out the cross-layer nature of the problem and include a simple physical-layer criterion in what is mostly a medium access control (MAC) problem.