Energy-Efficient Packet Scheduling under Two-Sided Delay Constraints

Achieving energy-efficiency is a hallmark of modern applications (multimedia communication, sensor networks, etc.) which exploit wireless communications. The classical approach to energy-efficient packet scheduling has presumed that wireless packets are subject to deadlines before which they need to be transmitted. Emerging applications such as security-critical communications, information freshness, molecular communications, and more, call for expanding the delay constraint to also include limits on the time after transmission. The current work thus strongly generalizes the energy-efficient scheduling problem to two-sided delay constraints that both strictly upper- and lower-bound departure times. The formulation for the new two-sided delay problem as well as a provably optimal offline algorithm are provided herein. The presented theoretical framework of two-sided constrained scheduling is general and can be leveraged in any scheduling application that involves packets with finite lifetimes both before and after their transmission.