Scheduling of Wireless Edge Networks for Feedback-Based Interactive Applications

Interactive applications with automated feedback will largely influence the design of future networked infrastructures. In such applications, status information about an environment of interest is captured and forwarded to a compute node, which analyzes the information and generates a feedback message. Timely processing and forwarding must ensure the feedback information to be still applicable; thus, the quality-of-service parameter for such applications is the end-to-end latency over the entire loop. By modelling the communication of a feedback loop as a two-hop network, we address the problem of allocating network resources in order to minimize the delay violation probability (DVP), i.e. the probability of the end-to-end latency exceeding a target value. We investigate the influence of the network queue states along the network path on the performance of semi-static and dynamic scheduling policies. The former determine the schedule prior to the transmission of the packet, while the latter benefit from feedback on the queue states as time evolves and reallocate time slots depending on the queue’s evolution. The performance of the proposed policies is evaluated for variations in several system parameters and comparison baselines. Results show that the proposed semi-static policy achieves close-to-optimal DVP and the dynamic policy outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.