Scheduling for multi-carrier wireless systems

  • Lisa Zhang | Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent

We consider a basestation transmitting data to a set of mobile users. At each time step the basestation receives information about the channel conditions to each user. These channel conditions are time-varying and user-dependent. The job of the scheduler is to pick a user to serve. In recent years this problem has received a great deal of attention. In the first part of the talk we give an overview of some specific models that arise from 3rd generation wireless standards. We summarize some of the main theoretical results and discuss the performance of scheduling algorithms that are implemented in practice.
We also consider the problem of scheduling wireless data in systems such as 802.16 (Wimax). Each scheduling decision involves constructing a frame of one or more time slots. Within each time slot multiple carriers must be assigned to users. We present some recent results in understanding the complexity of the multi-carrier scheduling problem.

Speaker Details

Dr. Lisa Zhang is a member of technical staff in the Algorithms Research Group at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. She received her B.A. in mathematics from Wellesley College in 1993 and her Ph.D. in Theory of Computing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. Her research area is algorithm design and analysis. Her research broadly concerns algorithmic and complexity issues of networking, with a focus on design and optimization, routing and scheduling protocols, and stability and Quality-of-Service analyses. She twice won the Bell Labs President’s Gold Award and the Lucent Chairman’s Award.

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