Channel-Aware Scheduling for Coded Packet Broadcasting in Full-Duplex Relay Networks

We consider the channel-aware scheduling (CAS) problem for block transmission of packets in two-hop full-duplex relay networks with multiple users. At each time slot, the full-duplex relay station (RS) can fetch a network-coded packet from the macro base station (BS), and schedule a previously received packet for broadcasting to the users over time-varying channels. Our goal is to maximize the broadcast throughput. Since the associated Markov decision programming problem turns out to be intractable as the size of the problem increases, we propose a CAS scheme which is simple to implement and also achieves near-optimal performance. We provide a closed-form expression of the throughput of our scheme when the BS-to-RS channel is perfect, and prove that our scheme is optimal for one-user systems. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our scheme performs close to an upper bound of the system and outperforms other transmission schemes.