Abstract—There have been recent attempts to develop scheduling schemes for downlink transmission in a single cell of a multi-channel (e.g., OFDM-based) cellular network. These works have been quite promising in that they have developed lowcomplexity index scheduling policies that are delay-optimal (in a large deviation rate-function sense). However, these policies require that the channel is ON or OFF in each time-slot with a fixed probability (i.e., there is no memory in the system), while the reality is that due to channel fading and doppler shift, channels are often time-correlated in these cellular systems. Thus, an important open question is whether one can find simple index scheduling policies that are delay-optimal even when the channels are time-correlated. In this paper, we attempt to answer this question for time-correlated ON/OFF channels. In particular, we show that the class of oldest packets first (OPF) policies that give a higher priority to packets with a large del...
Zhenzhi Qian, Bo Ji, Kannan Srinivasan, Ness B. Sh