Stability with file arrivals and departures in multichannel cellular wireless networks

This paper studies scheduling in multichannel wireless networks with flow-level dynamics. We consider a downlink network with a single base station, M channels (frequency bands), and multiple mobile users (flows). We also assume mobiles dynamically join the network to receive finite-size files and leave after downloading the complete files. A recent study van de Ven et al. (in Proc. IEEE Infocom., pp. 1701-1709, 2009) has shown that the MaxWeight algorithm fails to be throughput-optimal under these flow-level dynamics. The main contribution of this paper is the development of joint channel-assignment and workload-based scheduling algorithms for multichannel downlink networks with dynamic flow arrivals/departures. We prove that these algorithms are throughput-optimal. Our simulations further demonstrate that a hybrid channel-assignment and workload-based scheduling algorithm significantly improves the network performance (in terms of both file-transfer delay and blocking probability) compared to the existing algorithms.