An RL-based scheduling algorithm for video traffic in high-rate wireless personal area networks

The emerging high-rate wireless personal area network (WPAN) technology is capable of supporting high-speed and high-quality real-time multimedia applications. In particular, video streams are deemed to be a dominant traffic type, and require quality of service (QoS) support. However, in the current IEEE 802.15.3 standard for MAC (media access control) of high-rate WPANs, the implementation details of some key issues such as scheduling and QoS provisioning have not been addressed. In this paper, we first propose a Markov decision process (MDP) model for optimal scheduling for video flows in high-rate WPANs. Using this model, we also propose a scheduler that incorporates compact state space representation, function approximation, and reinforcement learning (RL). Simulation results show that our proposed RL scheduler achieves nearly optimal performance and performs better than F-SRPT, EDD + SRPT, and PAP scheduling algorithms in terms of a lower decoding failure rate. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.