Number Of Packet Arrivals Research Articles

Online Energy-Efficient Packet Scheduling for a Common Deadline With and Without Energy Harvesting

The problem of online packet scheduling to minimize the required conventional grid energy for transmitting a fixed number of packets given a common deadline is considered. The total number of packets arriving within the deadline is known, but the packet arrival times are unknown, and can be arbitrary. The proposed algorithm tries to finish the transmission of each packet assuming that all future packets are going to arrive at equal time intervals within the left-over time. The proposed online algorithm is shown to have competitive ratio that is logarithmic in the number of packet arrivals. The hybrid energy paradigm is also considered, where in addition to grid energy, energy is also available via extraction from renewable sources. The objective here is to minimize the grid energy use. A suitably modified version of the previous algorithm is also shown to have competitive ratio that is logarithmic in the number of packet arrivals.

On the Performance of Largest-Deficit-First for Scheduling Real-Time Traffic in Wireless Networks

This paper considers the problem of scheduling real-time traffic in wireless networks. We consider ad hoc wireless networks with general conflict graph-based interference model and single-hop traffic. Each packet is associated with a deadline and will be dropped if it is not transmitted before the deadline. The number of packet arrivals in each time-slot and the maximum delay before the deadline are independent and identically distributed across time. We require a minimum fraction of packets to be delivered. At each link, we assume the link keeps track of the difference between the minimum number of packets that need to be delivered so far and the number of packets that are actually delivered, which we call the deficit. The largest-deficit-first (LDF) policy schedules links in descending order according to their deficit values, which is a variation of the longest-queue-first (LQF) policy for non-real-time traffic. We prove that the efficiency ratio of LDF, which is the fraction of the throughput region that LDF can achieve for given traffic distributions, can be lower-bounded by a quantity that we call the real-time local-pooling factor (R-LPF). We further prove that a lower bound on the R-LPF can be related to the weighted sum of the service rates, with a special case of 1/(β + 1) by considering the uniform weight, where β is the interference degree of the conflict graph. We also propose a heuristic consensus algorithm that can be used to obtain a good weight vector for such lower bounds for given network topology.

Structural Properties of Optimal Transmission Policies Over a Randomly Varying Channel

We consider the problem of transmitting packets over a randomly varying point to point channel with the objective of minimizing the expected power consumption subject to a constraint on the average packet delay. By casting it as a constrained Markov decision process in discrete time with time-averaged costs, we prove structural results about the dependence of the optimal policy on buffer occupancy, number of packet arrivals in the previous slot and the channel fading state for both i.i.d. and Markov arrivals and channel fading. The techniques we use to establish such results: convexity, stochastic dominance, decreasing-differences, are among the standard ones for the purpose. Our main contribution, however, is the passage to the average cost case, a notoriously difficult problem for which rather limited results are available. The novel proof techniques used here are likely to have utility in other stochastic control problems well beyond their immediate application considered here.