A competitive scheduling problem and its relevance to Universal Mobile Telecommunications System channel assignment

This article investigates a two-user competitive scheduling problem. The problem arises in a Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) developed within the European IST project FUTURE: given two mobile terminals, one wants to maximize the on-time data packets transmitted to one user, while guaranteeing a certain amount of on-time data packets to the other. We show that the problem is NP-hard, despite peculiar properties of data and solutions. We propose fast Lagrangian heuristic able to cope with a severe real-time requirement, and compare it to a greedy-like heuristic on a set of practical instances.