Performance of proactive earliest due date packet scheduling in wireless networks

With the convergence of multimedia applications and wireless communications, there is a need to support real-time traffic in wireless networks. In general, real-time packets must be delivered before a certain delay upper bound. In the literature, feasible earliest due date (FEDD) is one of the scheduling algorithms proposed to provide packet delay upper bound guarantees over a time-varying wireless channel. However, FEDD is reactive with respect to changes in the wireless channel. In view of this, we propose a novel deadline-based scheduling algorithm called proactive earliest due date (PEDD), which dynamically adjusts a packet's deadline in anticipation of an upcoming change in the channel condition. Similar to FEDD, PEDD is idealistic, as they both assume the availability of the exact channel knowledge. This is not implementable and, thus, this paper further proposes a realistic version of PEDD, called R-PEDD. R-PEDD uses a probing mechanism to acquire the channel knowledge, which in turn is used for the packet deadline adjustment. Since probe packets consume bandwidth, a modified version of R-PEDD, called R-PEDD+ is proposed to derive the required channel information from recent packet transmissions. We have performed extensive simulations using OPNET to evaluate the performance of these proposed algorithms. In short, PEDD always outperforms a couple of existing algorithms in the literature. R-PEDD and R-PEDD+ are both capable of approximating the performance of the idealistic PEDD in a realistic wireless channel. However, their performance deteriorates with more rapid changes in the channel condition.