A Study on Application-Aware Scheduling in Wireless Networks

The past decade witnessed the dramatic evolution from Quality of Service (QoS) to Quality of Experience (QoE) in the design of wireless networks, especially on the aspect of link scheduling. In many applications, end users are concerned more about transmission quality of an individual task rather than the quality of a link, where a task may refer to a piece of music, video, etc. and may include many packets. This paper proposes a new network model aiming at improving user experience by pushing the scheduling problem to the task layer. A novel QoE requirement is designed to generalize the QoS requirements of a task, which is the ratio requirement. Following this design, a corresponding scheduling policy is proposed to capture it for each task and then reach an application-aware transmission allocation. We theoretically analyze the performance of the scheduling policy, and discuss the design of an optimal solution and the impact of the QoE requirements. Finally, the simulation results indicate that our scheduling policy can significantly improve QoE.