Performance analysis of scheduling policies for delay-tolerant applications in centralized wireless networks

Many scheduling schemes have been proposed in literature to control how different users access a wireless channel. Channel-aware schedulers exploit the measurements of instantaneous channel conditions of the different users to obtain throughput gains by proper selection of the users to transmit (or receive) in each channel state. In this paper, the performance of channel-aware scheduling policies which are applicable for delay-tolerant applications in centralized wireless networks are analyzed in a new mathematical framework. The framework is applied in numerical examples to compare the performance of different scheduling policies in terms of their efficiency in allocating the wireless resources. This efficiency is measured against the set of all possible operating points of the system, chosen, e.g., by the network operator.