Minimum energy transmission scheduling subject to deadline constraints

We consider the problem of transmission scheduling of data over a wireless fading channel with hard deadline constraints. Our system consists of N users, each with a fixed amount of data that must be served by a common deadline. Given that, for each user, the channel fade state determines the throughput per unit of energy expended, our objective is to minimize the overall expected energy consumption while satisfying the deadline constraint. We consider both a linear and a strictly convex rate-power curve and obtain optimal solutions, based on dynamic programming (DP), and tractable approximate heuristics in both cases. For the special non-fading channel case with convex rate-power curve, an optimal solution is obtained based on the Shortest Path formulation. In the case of a linear rate-power curve, our DP solution has a nice “threshold” form; while for the convex rate-power curve we are able to obtain a heuristic algorithm with comparable performance with that of the optimal scheduling scheme. Alessandro Tarello received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Communication Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy, in 2002 and 2006 respectively. He currently holds a Postdoctoral position at Politecnico di Torino. He visited the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2004 and 2005. During Summer 2005 he also visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA. He received the best student paper award at the Third International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad-Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOPT’05). His research interests are in the fields of stochastic and fluid models for performance evaluation of packet networks and optimization techniques for wireless and ad-hoc networks. Jun Sun received his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from University of Florida in 1997 and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. His research interest is on communication networks with emphasis on satellite and wireless networks. Murtaza Zafer received his B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, India, in 2001 and his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MA, USA, in 2003. Currently, he is pursuing his doctoral studies at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He spent the summer of 2004 at the Mathematical Sciences Research center, Bell Laboratories and the summer of 2003 at Qualcomm, Inc. His research interests lie in queueing theory, information theory, control and optimization theory and its applications to wireless communication networks. He is the co-recipient of the best Student Paper award at WiOpt, 2005. He also received the Siemens (India) and Philips (India) award for academic excellence. Eytan Modiano received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1986 and his M.S. and PhD degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He was a Naval Research Laboratory Fellow between 1987 and 1992 and a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow during 1992–1993. Between 1993 and 1999 he was with MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he was the project leader for MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) project. Since 1999 he has been on the faculty at MIT; where he is presently an Associate Professor. His research is on communication networks and protocols with emphasis on satellite, wireless, and optical networks. He is currently an Associate Editor for Communication Networks for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and for The International Journal of Satellite Communications. He had served as a guest editor for IEEE JSAC special issue on WDM network architectures; the Computer Networks Journal special issue on Broadband Internet Access; the Journal of Communications and Networks special issue on Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks; and for IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology special issue on Optical Networks. He is the Technical Program co-chair for Wiopt 2006, IEEE Infocom 2007, and ACM MobiHoc 2007.