A Novel Scheduling Algorithm for Video Traffic in High-Rate WPANs

The emerging high-rate wireless personal area network (WPAN) technology is capable of supporting high-speed and high-quality real-time multimedia applications. In particular, MPEG-4 video streams are deemed to be a widespread traffic type. However, in the current IEEE 802.15.3 standard for media access control (MAC) of high-rate WPANs, the implementation details of some key issues such as scheduling and quality of service (QoS) provisioning have not been addressed. In this paper, we first propose a mathematical model for the optimal scheduling scheme for MPEG-4 flows in high-rate WPANs. We also propose an RL scheduler based on the reinforcement learning (RL) technique. Simulation results show that our proposed RL scheduler achieves nearly optimal performance and performs better than F-SRPT (Mangharam et al., 2004), EDD+SRPT (Torok et al., 2005), and PAP (Kim and Cho, 2005) scheduling algorithms in terms of a lower decoding failure rate.