A Comprehensive Analysis of Optimal Link Scheduling for Emptying a Wireless Network

Wireless communications have become an important part of modern life. The ubiquitous wireless networks and connectivities generate exponentially increasing data traffic. In view of this, wireless network optimization, which aims at utilizing the limited resource, especially spectrum and energy, as efficiently as possible from a network perspective, is essential for performance improvement and sustainable development of wireless communications. In the dissertation, we focus on a fundamental problem of wireless network optimization, link scheduling, as well as its subproblem, link activation. The problem type arises because of the nature of wireless media and hence it is of relevance to a wide range of networks with multiple access. We freshen these classic problems up by novel extensions incorporating new technologies of interference management or with new performance metrics. We also revisit the problems in their classic setup to gain new theoretical results and insights for problem-solving. Throughout the study, we consider the problems with a general setup, such that the insights presented in this dissertation are not constrained to a specific technology or network type. Since link activation and scheduling are key elements of access coordination in wireless communications, the study opens up new approaches that significantly improve network performance, and eventually benefit practical applications. The dissertation consists of five research papers. The first paper addresses maximum link activation with cooperative transmission and interference cancellation. Papers II and III investigate the minimum-time link scheduling problem in general and a particular class of networks, respectively. In Paper IV, we consider the scheduling problem of emptying a network in its broad form and provide a general optimality condition. In Paper V, we study the scheduling problem with respect to age of information