Scheduling Periodic Real-time Traffic in Lossy Wireless Networks as Restless Multi-armed Bandit

Scheduling periodic real-time traffic in wireless networks is challenging due to the unreliable wireless channels. We first formulate the scheduling problem as a Restless Multi-armed Bandit (RMAB) problem. Then, we theoretically prove the indexability of the scheduling problem. Based on the indexability, we further derive the closed-form Whittle’s index. It motivates us to propose a simple index-based scheduling algorithm which schedules users with higher indices. Simulation results have demonstrated that the derived scheduling algorithm outperforms the EDF and myopic algorithms in terms of the total discounted reward.