Performance Comparison of Max-Delay Constrained Schedulers in Rayleigh Fading Channels

We consider the energy efficient scheduling of packets for a single user wireless link. We propose packet schedulers that meet individual per-packet maximum-delay constraints and present their performance. The main emphasis is on deriving an easy-to-implement scheduler with low average power consumption in a Rayleigh fading channel, and to identify areas of potential improvements. We firstly outline the structure of the optimal scheduler with prescient knowledge of the channel and the traffic pattern, and an efficient algorithm to derive this optimal schedule. This provides a baseline for comparison for all other schedulers. From the insight gained in the study of the prescient optimal scheduler, we remove algorithmic dependency on the future to derive a practical scheduler that has energy usage at most 6 dB away from the prescient optimal at 0.1% probability of bit outage under Rayleigh fading conditions.