Scheduling in wireless networks with spatial reuse of spectrum as restless bandits

We study the problem of scheduling packet transmissions with the aim of minimizing the energy consumption and data transmission delay of users in a wireless network in which spatial reuse of spectrum is employed. We approach this problem using the theory of Whittle index for cost minimizing restless bandits, which has been used to effectively solve problems in a variety of applications. We design two Whittle index based policies - the first by treating the graph representing the network as a clique and the second based on interference constraints derived from the original graph. We evaluate the performance of these two policies via extensive simulations, in terms of average cost and packets dropped, and show that they outperform the well-known Slotted ALOHA, maximum-weight scheduling, quadratic Lyapunov drift, and exponential Lyapunov drift algorithms, as well as an algorithm recently proposed by Cella and Cesa-Bianchi. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.