Abstract

We present an “opportunistic ” transmission scheduling policy that exploits time-varying channel conditions and maxi-mizes the system performance stochastically under a certain resource allocation constraint. We establish the optimality of the scheduling scheme, and also that every user experiences a performance improvement over any non-opportunistic scheduling policy when users have independent performance values. We demonstrate via simulation results that the scheme is robust to es-timation errors, and also works well for nonstationary scenarios, resulting in performance improvements of 20–150 % compared with a scheduling scheme that does not take into account channel conditions. Last, we discuss an extension of our opportunistic scheduling scheme to improve “short-term ” performance.

Citations