Our paper has been accepted to Computer Networks

Posted Date: Oct 25, 2021

Sunghoon Jung's work titled "Real-time dual-link transmission control for minimizing power and link switching cost" has been accepted to Computer Networks.

Congratulations!

Real-time dual-link transmission control for minimizing power and link switching cost

Sunghoon Jung and Saewoong Bahk

Abstract

This paper considers a problem of real-time control of uplink transmissions over dual links. In the problem, a UE is configured with dual links. We propose a joint control algorithm to choose a primary link and activate or deactivate each link in every slot. The activation of a link incurs uplink transmission power. Switching a primary link also incurs cost. The control algorithm aims to jointly minimize the transmission power and primary link switching cost, while minimizing transmission queues to reduce delays. The problem introduces several constraints on transmission power allocation and link activation. In particular, the secondary link can be activated only when it has non-empty transmission queues and the primary link is activated. For the primary link, no such restriction is imposed. These heterogeneous transmission constraints require the decisions to treat a time-varying decision set. Furthermore, the primary link switching cost may enforce the previous decisions to skew the current decision. To tackle such difficulties, we use Lyapunov optimization techniques and develop a control algorithm. We investigate the algorithm structure from the decisions made for special cases. We reveal that the primary link selection has a Shortest-Queue with Hysteresis structure. We also show that link activation control largely relies on transmission efficiency. We analyze the performance bound of our algorithm in terms of cost and queues to show that our algorithm can achieve an optimal target value. Finally, we present simulation results to verify the performance of our algorithm.