Fast Link Scheduling Policies for Persistent Data Ferrying

The persistent data-ferrying problem has a naturally cascaded structure between vehicle and communication dynamics, allowing the wireless link scheduling optimization to be encapsulated within a path-planning optimization problem. This work derives and analyzes policies to solve the inner link scheduling problem quickly. Given a path and properties about the communication environment, the link scheduling problem is formulated as a binary integer linear program with unique ferrying constraints. The performances of several heuristic link scheduling policies are analyzed in terms of computation effort and achievable throughput of the solution. The performance characteristics are then validated through simulation, showing that the greedy knapsack solution achieves within 99% of the optimal allocation in less than 2% of the computation time compared to traditional solvers. The quickness of this policy reduces the computational complexity needed to solve the full data-ferry problem.