Transmission Scheduling for Mass Transit in Data Wireless Networks

Abstract — Scheduling of down-link transmission for data ap-plications in wireless networks has been the focus of recent research. Channel-aware scheduling algorithms were shown to achieve significant performance gains by accounting for the time varying reception capacities and exploiting their independence across the mobile users. We deviate from these studies by considering mass-transit systems, in which reception capacities of the mobile users are not independent and are positively correlated and thus pose a potential problem due to the bursty traffic requirements they inflict on the cells. We study the performance of these systems aiming at providing a solution to this bursty traffic, and propose a down-link scheduling algorithm that maximizes the resources allocated to the ”standard ” mobile users while obeying the delay constraints of the train mobile users. We further propose a new architecture for train wireless support systems, based on spatially separated reception train antennas which achieves significant throughput gains. Analysis of this system shows that the combination of the proposed scheduling algorithm with the proposed architecture results in significant system performance improvement. I