wireless network schedulers

Abstract: We study episodic finite-horizon Bayesian bandits, or meta-bandits, with independent arms. Each episode draws fresh arm qualities from unknown recurring priors. Observations arrive after known delays, and plays obey hard per-episode caps and total budgets. A play earns reward and informs both the current quality and the recurring prior: the learner must explore, use, and generalize. We formulate a common planning optimization over learning trajectories. Its LP relaxation values experiments through current reward, resource consumption and continuation: the value of future decisions from the learning state produced. Dual prices separate the arms into local programs and certify every admissible policy, including hierarchical Thompson sampling. Execution enforces the hard constraints while preserving the promised learning transitions or accounting for their loss. The framework also represents risk-sensitive objectives and prices purchased observations and buyout options. Delayed reports create planned restlessness: an arm's information changes while it is not played, through reports of its own earlier plays arriving on a known calendar. For stationary priors, finite reward alphabets, bounded report lag and nonbinding budgets, posterior sampling over the recurring priors bounds the price of not knowing them by $O(\sqrt{N})$ over $N$ episodes, with other parameters fixed. For one undelayed $T$-step episode with arms capped at $T/X$ plays each, we obtain the LP-relative approximation factor $1+(2πX)^{-1/2}+O(X^{-1})$, improving previous factors, with a matching lower bound for the leading term.

Abstract: Closed-form fractional programming (FP), weighted MMSE (WMMSE), and the 2026 surrogate-enhanced methods SEFP and XMMSE all maximize the weighted sum rate by iteratively maximizing a surrogate linear in the interference power. We show that this family admits a unique best member: the interference-conjugate transform (ICT), which replaces each rate term $\log(1+a/b)$ by $\max_{κ\ge0}[Ω(κa)-κb]$, where $Ω$ is the closed-form partial convex conjugate of the rate in the interference variable and the optimal multiplier is the interference price $a/(b(a+b))$. We prove that, for any fixed price, $Ω(κ\,\cdot)$ is the pointwise largest own-signal function compatible with a valid interference-linear lower bound, and that tightness at an anchor forces the price. Hence all four benchmark surrogates, which share this price and differ only in their own-signal term, are dominated pointwise by ICT. At SINR $γ$, the benchmarks' own-signal curvature exceeds the true curvature by factors behaving as $γ/2$ (FP/WMMSE) and $(\logγ)/2$ (SEFP/XMMSE), against $1+1/(γ(γ+2))$ for ICT, and this ordering carries over to the certified ascent per iteration and the asymptotic linear convergence rate. ICT yields closed-form updates at the benchmarks' per-iteration cost for single-antenna power control, uplink joint scheduling and power control, and multi-cell MISO beamforming, and the first solver-free algorithm for sum-least-$q$th-percentile rate maximization, via a $K$-dimensional convex dual with closed-form gradient and Hessian and a certified duality gap. In uplink scheduling, ICT improves proportional-fairness utility over FP by +7.03 and over SEFP by +3.35 (60/60 drops) using 18.7 iterations per slot vs. 49.7 and 38.0; in MISO beamforming with $M=8$, it reaches 99.9% of its final value in a median of 9 iterations vs. 16 (XMMSE) and 1160 (FP/WMMSE).

Abstract: Isochronous ultra-wideband (UWB) audio transport must deliver a complete service data unit (SDU) before its presentation deadline; fragment reception rate and aggregate throughput do not directly characterize this objective. We formulate admission and online service over a periodic calendar of finite exchange opportunities, explicitly accounting for fragmented SDUs, bounded attempts, calendar alignment, and timing uncertainty. For equal-duration, freely assignable opportunities, an interval-demand condition characterizes finite-job reservation feasibility, and an earliest-deadline-first construction realizes a feasible reservation. A separate necessary capacity bound identifies loads that cannot sustain complete-SDU delivery even with no transmission errors. For online overload control, we study a deadline-aware policy that discards an SDU when its outstanding fragments exceed the remaining eligible opportunities. Across 3,456 replicated scheduling runs and 432 supplemental sensitivity runs, pruning raises eight-stream burst-loss timely completion from 45.441\% to 59.399\%, a paired difference of $13.958\pm2.080$ percentage points (pointwise 95\% interval). At four streams, round robin instead attains slightly higher completion, while heavy overload causes pronounced per-stream imbalance. A finite design enumeration and an evaluated multi-stream fragmentation envelope quantify the interaction among scheduling, payload overhead, and capacity. These findings distinguish provable admission conditions from online deadline salvage and expose the aggregate-throughput versus per-stream-service tradeoff in UWB audio scheduling.

Abstract: Teams of autonomous agents, including large language model (LLM) agents, must coordinate over scarce and unreliable wireless links. We propose goal-oriented semantic communication (GOSC), a closed-loop co-design that jointly decides what each agent sends, when it sends it, and how reliably it is transmitted, based on each message's value to the team task. An edge broadcast of the team's common knowledge closes the loop by updating these values. We prove that a message is sent only if its value exceeds the cost of delivering it and that more valuable messages receive more robust transmission rates, and we show that the scheduler solves each scheduling step exactly whenever the radio budget is not saturated, which held in 95% of scheduling decisions. In search-and-rescue missions validated on unseen scenarios, GOSC meets the same mission targets as carefully tuned periodic semantic schemes with 1.2--8.5 times fewer uplink channel uses. In most settings, this advantage persists with realistic packet overheads, reaching 16.6 times fewer uplink channel uses and 13.8 times lower cost when downlink costs are included; in the rescue task, it also persists when all agents share one uplink. Rough value estimates suffice, whereas values that ignore message content can fail. With three different LLMs, GOSC uses 3.2--3.5 times fewer channel uses, while completion-time gains depend on the model.

Abstract: Emerging 6G industrial IoT architectures require wireless networked control systems capable of stabilizing diverse control loops over tightly constrained radio resources. Conventional periodic and Age-of-Information (AoI) based scheduling guarantees bounded staleness at the cost of persistent channel saturation. Conversely, pure event-triggered (PureET) strategies minimize transmissions but risk catastrophic silent deterioration when local sensor-side thresholds fail to reflect critical state evolution. To bridge this gap, we propose a communication-control co-design framework governed by a 6G Semantic Layer that independently arbitrates uplink and downlink resources. Instead of relying on freshness, our architecture evaluates the actual control impact of a packet using the state-to-error ratio (SER). We unify this control confidence with channel reliability in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to orchestrate a threshold-based sensor push and a state-aware controller pull mechanism. To ensure equitable resource allocation across dynamically heterogeneous plants, the proposed framework explicitly scales actuation deadbands according to local plant dynamics. Simulations over Rayleigh-faded channels demonstrate that this approach fundamentally shifts the Pareto frontier between transmission rate and control quality. The proposed scheme achieves tracking accuracy comparable to periodic schedulers at a reduced communication overhead, while mitigating the estimation errors characteristic of PureET.