Scheduling delay-sensitive and best-effort traffics in wireless networks

In this paper we propose a novel wireless scheduling algorithm for delay-sensitive (DS) and best-effort (BE) traffics. Unlike the majority of the previous wireless scheduling, where the wireless links are modeled as having only two states, our algorithm is applicable to links with multiple states. For DS flows, the algorithm is capable of providing statistical delay violation bounds. Such bounds are derived, analytically, using the idea of the statistical service envelope. For BE flows, we propose a new notion of fairness, called long-term link-quality weighted outcome-fair, which we believe is more suited to wireless networks than pure outcome-fair or effort-fair. The algorithm achieves a balance between bandwidth efficiency requirement and fairness requirement, and guarantees minimal goodput levels for BE flows.