Non-real time content scheduling in wireless data networks

Abstract

Non-real time content delivery constitutes a major portion wireless data services in 3G networks. The per-packet performance guarantees required for real-time applications, such as voice and streaming media, is achieved through conventional flow-based scheduling mechanisms. However, for data services, such scheduling mechanisms cannot be used since the key performance measure for non-real time applications is the total download time. In this paper, we present a two-layer scheduling architecture that combines content-aware scheduling with opportunistic scheduling. In terms of content-awareness, the proposed scheduling policy provides guarantees to the download time of a content. Furthermore, through parallelizing the schedule and using opportunistic channel usage, the scheme achieves higher throughput. Extensive simulations verify the efficiency of our proposed schemes and provide insights into the behavior of the scheduling algorithms.