Throughput Optimal Scheduling for Wireless Downlinks with Reconfiguration Delay

We consider wireless downlinks where the base station dynamically switches between different users in order to transmit data intended for the respective users. When the base station switches from serving one user to another, there is a reconfiguration delay. For such wireless downlinks with reconfiguration delay we consider the problem of throughput optimal scheduling. We propose the 1-lookahead scheduling policy and analytically show that it is throughput optimal. We obtain the 1-lookahead policy by using an approximate solution to a Markov decision process formulation of the scheduling problem. The approximate solution is also used to explain the biased maxweight form of 1-lookahead as well as an existing policy.