A dynamic programming approach for optimal scheduling policy in wireless networks

We discuss scheduling policies in wireless networks with fading channels. A utility function that takes both the communication throughput and the transmission delay into account is defined. A dynamic programming optimization method is used to obtain the optimal scheduling policy which explores the channel dynamics and gets a reasonable trade-off between the communication throughput and the packet transmission delay. A near-optimal solution is also presented to deal with problems with large state space. Through simulation results, we show that our policy can improve the performance in both aspects of throughput and transmission delay, compared to the well-known weighted round-robin scheme which does not consider channel dynamics.