A common situation occurring when dealing with multimedia traffic is having large data frames fragmented into smaller IP packets, and having these packets sent independently through the network. For real-time multimedia traffic, dropping even few packets of a frame may render the entire frame useless. Such traffic is usually modeled as having {\em inter-packet dependencies}. We study the problem of scheduling traffic with such dependencies, where each packet has a deadline by which it should arrive at its destination. Such deadlines are common for real-time multimedia applications, and are derived from stringent delay constraints posed by the application. The figure of merit in such environments is maximizing the system's {\em goodput}, namely, the number of frames successfully delivered.
We study online algorithms for the problem of maximizing goodput of delay-bounded traffic with inter-packet dependencies, and use competitive analysis to evaluate their performance. We present competitive algorithms for the problem, as well as matching lower bounds that are tight up to a constant factor. We further present the results of a simulation study which further validates our algorithmic approach and shows that insights arising from our analysis are indeed manifested in practice.
Renewable energy assisted heterogeneous networks can improve system capacity and reduce conventional energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP)-based downlink packet scheduling scheme for solar energy assisted heterogeneous networks (HetNets), where solar radiation is modeled as a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) and the arrivals of multi-class downlink packets are modeled as Poisson processes. The proposed downlink packet scheduling scheme can be compatible with the mainstream wireless packet networks such as long-term evolution (LTE) networks and t…
The main cause of wasted energy consumption in wireless sensor networks is packet collision. The packet scheduling algorithm is therefore introduced to solve this problem. Some packet scheduling algorithms can also influence and delay the data transmitting in the real-time wireless sensor networks. This paper presents the packet scheduling algorithm (PSA) in order to reduce the packet congestion in MAC layer leading to reduce the overall of packet collision in the system The PSA is compared with the simple CSMA/CA and other approaches using network topology benchmarks in mathematical method. T…
This paper proposes AFMT, a packet scheduling algorithm to achieve adaptive flow-aware multipath tunnelling. AFMT has two unique properties. Firstly, it implements robust adaptive traffic splitting for the subtunnels. Secondly, it detects and schedules bursts of packets cohesively, a scheme that already enabled traffic splitting for load balancing with little to no packet reordering. Several NS-3 experiments over different network topologies show that AFMT successfully deals with changing path characteristics due to background traffic while increasing throughput and reliability.
In this paper we address a seemingly simple question: Is there a universal packet scheduling algorithm? More precisely, we analyze (both theoretically and empirically) whether there is a single packet scheduling algorithm that, at a network-wide level, can match the results of any given scheduling algorithm. We find that in general the answer is "no". However, we show theoretically that the classical Least Slack Time First (LSTF) scheduling algorithm comes closest to being universal and demonstrate empirically that LSTF can closely, though not perfectly, replay a wide range of scheduling algor…
Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) are expected to have great potential to improve both traffic safety and comfort in the future. When many vehicles want to access data through roadside unit, data scheduling become an important issue. In this paper, we identify some challenges in roadside based data access. To address these challenges we first review some existing scheduling schemes. We then propose a priority scheduling and finally show that using this idea can increase QOS compare to previous algorithms.
This survey paper provides a detailed explanation of Long Term Evolution cellular network packet scheduling algorithms in both downlink and uplink directions. It starts by explaining the difference between Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access that is used in downlink transmission, and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access is used in uplink. Then, it explains the difference between the LTE scheduling process in the donwlink and uplink through explaining the interaction between users and the scheduler. Then, it explains the most commonly used downlink and uplink scheduling a…
Switches today provide a small set of scheduling algorithms. While we can tweak scheduling parameters, we cannot modify algorithmic logic, or add a completely new algorithm, after the switch has been designed. This paper presents a design for a programmable packet scheduler, which allows scheduling algorithms---potentially algorithms that are unknown today---to be programmed into a switch without requiring hardware redesign. Our design builds on the observation that scheduling algorithms make two decisions: in what order to schedule packets and when to schedule them. Further, in many schedulin…
Channel-dependent scheduling of transmission of data packets in a wireless system is based on measurement and feedback of the channel quality. To alleviate the performance degradation due to simultaneous multiple imperfect channel quality information (CQI), a simple and efficient packet scheduling (PS) algorithm is developed in downlink LTE system for real time traffic. A frequency domain channel predictor based on Kalman filter is first developed to restore the true CQI from erroneous channel quality feedback. Then, a time domain grouping technique employing the joint of Proportional Fair (PF…
Packet scheduling determines the ordering of packets in a queuing data structure with respect to some ranking function that is mandated by a scheduling policy. It is the core component in many recent innovations to optimize network performance and utilization. Our focus in this paper is on the design and deployment of packet scheduling in software. Software schedulers have several advantages over hardware including shorter development cycle and flexibility in functionality and deployment location. We substantially improve current software packet scheduling performance, while maintaining flexib…
In this paper we have studied downlink packet scheduling algorithms proposed for LTE cellular networks. The study emphasize on three most promising scheduling algorithms such as: FLS, EXP rule and LOG rule. The performance of these three algorithms is conducted over video traffic in a vehicular environment using LTE-Sim simulator. The simulation was setup with varying number of users from 10 - 60 in fixed bounded regions of 1 km radius. The main goal this study is to provide results that will help in the design process of packet scheduler for LTE cellular networks, aiming to get better overall…
In ad hoc networks, the scheduling of route-request packets should be different from that of message packets, because during transmission of message packets the location of the destination is known whereas in route discovery this is not known in most of the cases. The router has to depend upon the last known location, if any, of the destination to determine the center and radius of the circle that embeds all possible current position of the destination. Route-request packets generated from the source are directed towards this circle i.e., directional route discovery can be applied. Otherwise, …
Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a transport layer protocol that allows network devices to transfer data over multiple concurrent paths, and hence, utilizes the network resources more effectively than does the traditional single-path TCP. However, as a reliable protocol, MPTCP still needs to deliver data packets (to the upper application) at the receiver in the same order they are transmitted at the sender. The out-of-order packet problem becomes more severe for MPTCP due to the heterogeneous nature of delay and bandwidth of each path. In this paper, we propose the forward-delay-based packet schedulin…
This paper proposes a fair and efficient QoS scheduling scheme for IEEE 802.16 BWA systems that satisfies both throughput and delay guarantee to various real and non-real time applications. The proposed QoS scheduling scheme is compared with an existing QoS scheduling scheme proposed in literature in recent past. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling scheme can provide a tight QoS guarantee in terms of delay, delay violation rate and throughput for all types of traffic as defined in the WiMAX standard, thereby maintaining the fairness and helps to eliminate starvation of lower p…
Wireless sensor networks sense and monitor real-time events. They supervise a geographic area where a phenomenon is to be monitored. The data in sensor networks have different levels of priority and hence their criticality differs. In order to keep up the real time commitment, the applications need higher transmission rates and reliability in information delivery. In this work we propose a multipath routing algorithm which enables the reliable delivery of data. By controlling the scheduling rate, it is possible to prevent congestion and packet loss in the network. The algorithm provides an eff…
Packet transmission scheduling on multi-hop wireless sensor networks with 3-egress gateway linear topology is studied. Each node generates a data packet in every one cycle period and forwards it bounded for either of gateways at edges. We focus on centrally-managed Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)-based slot allocations and provide the design of a packet transmission scheduling framework with static time-slot allocation and basic redundant transmission to reduce and recover packet losses. We proposed three general path models, which would represent all possible variations of this topology,…
Flow scheduling is crucial in data centers, as it directly influences user experience of applications. According to different assumptions and design goals, there are four typical flow scheduling problems/solutions: SRPT, LAS, Fair Queueing, and Deadline-Aware scheduling. When implementing these solutions in commodity switches with limited number of queues, they need to set static parameters by measuring traffic in advance, while optimal parameters vary across time and space. This paper proposes a generic framework, namely QCluster, to adapt all scheduling problems for limited number of queues.…
It is by now well-known that wireless networks with file arrivals and departures are stable if one uses alpha-fair congestion control and back-pressure based scheduling and routing. In this paper, we examine whether ?alpha-fair congestion control is necessary for flow-level stability. We show that stability can be ensured even with very simple congestion control mechanisms, such as a fixed window size scheme which limits the maximum number of packets that are allowed into the ingress queue of a flow. A key ingredient of our result is the use of the difference between the logarithms of queue le…
In this paper, we propose fairness-oriented packet scheduling (PS) schemes with power-efficient control mechanism for future packet radio systems. In general, the radio resource management functionality plays an important role in new OFDMA based networks. The control of the network resource division among the users is performed by packet scheduling functionality based on maximizing cell coverage and capacity satisfying, and certain quality of service requirements. Moreover, multiantenna transmit-receive schemes provide additional flexibility to packet scheduler functionality. In order to mitig…
Admission control schemes and scheduling algorithms are designed to offer QoS services in 802.16/802.16e networks and a number of studies have investigated these issues. But the channel condition and priority of traffic classes are very rarely considered in the existing scheduling algorithms. Although a number of energy saving mechanisms have been proposed for the IEEE 802.16e, to minimize the power consumption of IEEE 802.16e mobile stations with multiple real-time connections has not yet been investigated. Moreover, they mainly consider non real- time connections in IEEE 802.16e networks. In…
The number of LTE users and their applications has increased significantly in the last decade, which increased the demand on the mobile network. LTE-Advanced comes with many features that can support this increasing demand. LTE-Advanced supports Heterogeneous Networks deployment, in which it consists of a mix of macro-cells, remote radio heads, and low power nodes such as Pico-cells, and Femto-cells. Embedding this mix of base-stations in a macro-cellular network allows for achieving significant gains in coverage, throughput and system capacity compared to the use of macro-cells only. These ba…
In this paper we propose a new scheduling algorithm called Real Time Scheduling (RTS) which uses virtual nodes for self stabilization. This algorithm deals with all the contributing components of the end-to-end travelling delay of data packets in sensor network and with virtual nodes algorithm achieves QoS in terms of packet delivery, multiple connections, better power management and stable routes in case of failure. RTS delays packets at intermediate hops (not just prioritizes them) for a duration that is a function of their deadline. Delaying packets allows the network to avoid hot spotting …
Data communication in sensor networks can have timing constraints like end to end deadlines. If the deadlines are not met either a catastrophe can happen in hard real time systems or performance deterioration can occur in soft real time systems. In real time sensor networks, the recovery of data through retransmission should be minimized due to the stringent requirements on the worst case time delays. This paper presents the application of Stop and Go Multihop protocol (SGMH) at node level in wireless sensor networks for scheduling and hence to meet the hard real time routing requirements. SGM…
In multiview applications, multiple cameras acquire the same scene from different viewpoints and generally produce correlated video streams. This results in large amounts of highly redundant data. In order to save resources, it is critical to handle properly this correlation during encoding and transmission of the multiview data. In this work, we propose a correlation-aware packet scheduling algorithm for multi-camera networks, where information from all cameras are transmitted over a bottleneck channel to clients that reconstruct the multiview images. The scheduling algorithm relies on a new …
Traditional ad-hoc network packet scheduling schemes cannot fulfill the requirements of proximity-based ad-hoc social networks (ASNETs) and they do not behave properly in congested environments. To address this issue, we propose a user popularity-based packet scheduling scheme for congestion control in ASNETs called Pop-aware. The proposed algorithm exploits social popularity of sender nodes to prioritize all incoming flows. Pop-aware also provides fairness of service received by each flow. We evaluate the performance of Pop-aware through a series of simulations. In comparison with some existi…
Quite a few algorithms have been proposed to optimize the transmission performance of Multipath TCP (MPTCP). However, existing MPTCP protocols are still far from satisfactory in lossy and ever-changing networks because of their loss-based congestion control and the difficulty of managing multiple subflows. Recently, a congestion-based congestion control, BBR, is proposed to promote TCP transmission performance through better use of bandwidth. Due to the superior performance of BBR, we try to boost MPTCP with it. For this propose, coupled congestion control should be redesigned for MPTCP, and a…
This paper studies the problem of congestion control and scheduling in ad hoc wireless networks that have to support a mixture of best-effort and real-time traffic. Optimization and stochastic network theory have been successful in designing architectures for fair resource allocation to meet long-term throughput demands. However, to the best of our knowledge, strict packet delay deadlines were not considered in this framework previously. In this paper, we propose a model for incorporating the quality of service (QoS) requirements of packets with deadlines in the optimization framework. The sol…
Various middleboxes are ubiquitously deployed in networks to perform packet processing functions, such as firewalling, proxy, scheduling, etc., for the flows passing through them. With the explosion of network traffic and the demand for multiple types of network resources, it has never been more challenging for a middlebox to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees to grouped flows. Unfortunately, all currently existing fair queueing algorithms fail in supporting hierarchical scheduling, which is necessary to provide QoS guarantee to the grouped flows of multiple service classes. In this p…
We consider the transmission of packets across a lossy end-to-end network path so as to achieve low in-order delivery delay. This can be formulated as a decision problem, namely deciding whether the next packet to send should be an information packet or a coded packet. Importantly, this decision is made based on delayed feedback from the receiver. While an exact solution to this decision problem is challenging, we exploit ideas from queueing theory to derive scheduling policies based on prediction of a receiver queue length that, while suboptimal, can be efficiently implemented and offer subst…
Cellular networks provide communication for different applications. Some applications have strict and very short latency requirements, while others require high bandwidth with varying priorities. The challenge of satisfying the requirements grows in congested traffic where some packets might miss their deadlines. Unfortunately, we prove that the problem is NP-Hard. To overcome this, we propose a new scheduling policy for packets with multiple priorities, latency requirements, and strict deadlines. To alleviate the complexity, our solution incorporates a novel time domain relaxation solved by l…
The packet is the fundamental unit of transportation in modern communication networks such as the Internet. Physical layer scheduling decisions are made at the level of packets, and packet-level models with exogenous arrival processes have long been employed to study network performance, as well as design scheduling policies that more efficiently utilize network resources. On the other hand, a user of the network is more concerned with end-to-end bandwidth, which is allocated through congestion control policies such as TCP. Utility-based flow-level models have played an important role in under…
Along with the rapid growth of Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) applications and their penetration into many industry sectors, real-time wireless networks (RTWNs) have been playing a more critical role in providing real-time, reliable and secure communication services for such applications. A key challenge in RTWN management is how to ensure real-time Quality of Services (QoS) especially in the presence of unexpected disturbances and lossy wireless links. Most prior work takes centralized approaches for handling disturbances, which are slow and subject to single-point failure, and do not s…
Scheduling is a critical and challenging resource allocation mechanism for multihop wireless networks. It is well known that scheduling schemes that favor links with larger queue length can achieve high throughput performance. However, these queue-length-based schemes could potentially suffer from large (even infinite) packet delays due to the well-known last packet problem, whereby packets belonging to some flows may be excessively delayed due to lack of subsequent packet arrivals. Delay-based schemes have the potential to resolve this last packet problem by scheduling the link based on the d…
Interconnection networks of parallel systems are used for servicing traf- fic generated by different applications, often belonging to different users. When multiple traffic flows contend for channel bandwidth, the scheduling algorithm regulating the access to that channel plays a key role in ensur- ing that each flow obtains the required quality of service. Fairness is a highly desirable property for a scheduling algorithm. We show that using the Relative Fairness Bound as a fairness measure may lead to decrease in throughput and increase in latency. We propose an alternative metric to evaluat…
The vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) based on dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) is a distributed communication system, in which all the nodes share the wireless channel with carrier sense multiple access/collision avoid (CSMA/CA) protocol. However, the competition and backoff mechanisms of CSMA/CA often bring additional delays and data packet collisions, which may hardly meet the QoS requirements in terms of delay and packets delivery ratio (PDR). Moreover, because of the distribution nature of security information in broadcast mode, the sender cannot know whether the receivers have r…
WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) technology has emerged in response to the increasing demand for multimedia services in the internet broadband networks. WiMAX standard has defined five different scheduling services to meet the QoS (Quality of Service) requirement of multimedia applications and this paper investigates one specific scheduling service, i.e. UGS scheduling. In parallel, it was observed that in the difference of the traditional quality assessment approaches, nowadays, current researches are centered on the user perception of the quality, the existing scheduli…
WiFi offloading, where mobile device users (e.g., smart phone users) transmit packets through WiFi networks rather than cellular networks, is a promising solution to alleviating the heavy traffic burden of cellular networks due to data explosion. However, since WiFi networks are intermittently available, a mobile device user in WiFi offloading usually needs to wait for WiFi connection and thus experiences longer delay of packet transmission. To motivate users to participate in WiFi offloading, cellular network operators give incentives (rewards like coupons, e-coins) to users who wait for WiFi…
3GPP has introduced LTE Femtocells to manipulate the traffic for indoor users and to minimize the charge on the Macro cells. A key mechanism in the LTE traffic handling is the packet scheduler which is in charge of allocating resources to active flows in both the frequency and time dimension. So several scheduling algorithms need to be analyzed for femtocells networks. In this paper we introduce a performance analysis of three distinct scheduling algorithms of mixed type of traffic flows in LTE femtocells networks. The particularly study is evaluated in terms of throughput, packet loss ratio, …
This paper studies the problem of scheduling in single-hop wireless networks with real-time traffic, where every packet arrival has an associated deadline and a minimum fraction of packets must be transmitted before the end of the deadline. Using optimization and stochastic network theory we propose a framework to model the quality of service (QoS) requirements under delay constraints. The model allows for fairly general arrival models with heterogeneous constraints. The framework results in an optimal scheduling algorithm which fairly allocates data rates to all flows while meeting long-term …
We consider the optimal packet scheduling problem in a single-user energy harvesting wireless communication system. In this system, both the data packets and the harvested energy are modeled to arrive at the source node randomly. Our goal is to adaptively change the transmission rate according to the traffic load and available energy, such that the time by which all packets are delivered is minimized. Under a deterministic system setting, we assume that the energy harvesting times and harvested energy amounts are known before the transmission starts. For the data traffic arrivals, we consider …
In this paper, we consider energy efficient multiuser scheduling. Packet loss tolerance of the applications is exploited to minimize average system energy. There is a constraint on average packet drop rate and maximum number of packets dropped successively (bursty loss). A finite buffer size is assumed. We propose a scheme which schedules the users opportunistically according to the channel conditions, packet loss constraints and buffer size parameters. We assume imperfect channel state information at the transmitter side and analyze the scheme in large user limit using stochastic optimization…
Many emerging distributed applications, including big data analytics, generate a number of flows that concurrently transport data across data center networks. To improve their performance, it is required to account for the behavior of a collection of flows, i.e., coflows, rather than individual. State-of-the-art solutions allow for a near-optimal completion time by continuously reordering the unfinished coflows at the end-host, using network priorities. This paper shows that dynamically changing flow priorities at the end host, without taking into account in-flight packets, can cause high-degr…
This article considers the joint problem of packet scheduling and self-localization in an underwater acoustic sensor network where sensor nodes are distributed randomly in an operating area. In terms of packet scheduling, our goal is to minimize the localization time, and to do so we consider two packet transmission schemes, namely a collision-free scheme (CFS), and a collision-tolerant scheme (CTS). The required localization time is formulated for these schemes, and through analytical results and numerical examples their performances are shown to be generally comparable. However, when the pac…
In this paper we explore the problem of achieving efficient packet transmission over unreliable links with worst case occurrence of errors. In such a setup, even an omniscient offline scheduling strategy cannot achieve stability of the packet queue, nor is it able to use up all the available bandwidth. Hence, an important first step is to identify an appropriate metric for measuring the efficiency of scheduling strategies in such a setting. To this end, we propose a relative throughput metric which corresponds to the long term competitive ratio of the algorithm with respect to the optimal. We …
When IP-packet processing is unconditionally carried out on behalf of an operating system kernel thread, processing systems can experience overload in high incoming traffic scenarios. This is especially worrying for embedded real-time devices controlling their physical environment in industrial IoT scenarios and automotive systems. We propose an embedded real-time aware IP stack adaption with an early demultiplexing scheme for incoming packets and subsequent per-flow aperiodic scheduling. By instrumenting existing embedded IP stacks, rigid prioritization with minimal latency is deployed withou…
This paper studies the problem of serving multiple live video streams to several different clients from a single access point over unreliable wireless links, which is expected to be major a consumer of future wireless capacity. This problem involves two characteristics. On the streaming side, different video streams may generate variable-bit-rate traffic with different traffic patterns. On the network side, the wireless transmissions are unreliable, and the link qualities differ from client to client. In order to alleviate the above stochastic aspects of both video streams and link unreliabili…
Throughput and per-packet delay can present strong trade-offs that are important in the cases of delay sensitive applications.We investigate such trade-offs using a random linear network coding scheme for one or more receivers in single hop wireless packet erasure broadcast channels. We capture the delay sensitivities across different types of network applications using a class of delay metrics based on the norms of packet arrival times. With these delay metrics, we establish a unified framework to characterize the rate and delay requirements of applications and optimize system parameters. In …
We suggest and analyze algorithms for routing in multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks that exploit mutual information accumulation as the physical layer transmission scheme, and are capable of routing multiple packet streams (commodities) when only the average channel state information is present and that only locally. The proposed algorithms are modifications of the Diversity Backpressure (DIVBAR) algorithm, under which the packet whose commodity has the largest "backpressure metric" is chosen to be transmitted and is forwarded through the link with the largest differential backlog (queue lengt…
The bulk of the research on Long Term Evolution/Long Term Evolution-Advanced packet scheduling is concentrated in the downlink and the uplink is comparatively less explored. In up-link, channel aware scheduling with throughput maximization has been widely studied while considering an infinitely back-logged buffer model, which makes the investigations unrealistic. Therefore, we propose an optimal uplink packet scheduling pro-cedure with realistic traffic sources. Firstly, we advocate a joint channel and buffer aware algorithm, which maximizes the actual transmitted bit-count. Thereafter, we int…
