Universal Policy Tracking: Scheduling for Wireless Networks with Delayed State Observation

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Universal Tracking (UT) algorithm, which effectively mimics arbitrary scheduling algorithms in wireless networks despite delayed state observations, ensuring performance guarantees and outperforming naive methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel UT framework that tracks arbitrary scheduling algorithms under delay, providing bounded performance gaps and robustness in wireless network scheduling.

Findings

UT outperforms naive delayed decision methods

Performance gap between UT and target algorithms is bounded

Numerical experiments confirm UT's effectiveness

Abstract

Numerous scheduling algorithms have been proposed to optimize various performance metrics like throughput, delay and utility in wireless networks. However, these algorithms often require instantaneous access to network state information, which is not always available. While network stability can sometimes be achieved with delayed state information, other performance metrics such as latency may degrade. Thus, instead of simply stabilizing the system, our goal is to design a framework that can mimic arbitrary scheduling algorithms with performance guarantees. A naive approach is to make decisions directly with delayed information, but we show that such methods may lead to poor performance. Instead, we propose the Universal Tracking (UT) algorithm that can mimic the actions of arbitrary scheduling algorithms under observation delay. We rigorously show that the performance gap between UT and the scheduling algorithm being tracked is bounded by constants. Our numerical experiments show that UT significantly outperforms the naive approach in various applications.