Scheduling real-time traffic with deadlines over a wireless channel

Recently, there has been widespread interest in the extension of data networks to the wireless domain. However, scheduling results from the wireline domain do not carry over to wireless systems because wireless channels have unique characteristics not found in wireline channels, namely, limited bandwidth, bursty channel errors and location-dependent channel errors. In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling multiple real-time streams with deadlines, over a shared channel. We show that, in general, unlike the wireline case, the earliest due date (EDD) or shortest time to extinction (STE) policy is not always the optimal policy, even if the channel state is perfectly known and EDD is implemented only over channels in a "Good" state. Here, optimality is measured with respect to the number of packets lost due to deadline expiry. However, for most values of the channel parameters that are of practical interest, we show through analytical and numerical results that the EDD policy over "Good" channels is nearly optimal. Finally, through simulations, we also show that by combining this policy with fair scheduling mechanisms would result in scheduling algorithms that provide some degree of isolation between the sources as well as provide a natural way of compensating channels that see prolonged error bursts.