  We consider a wireless network with a set of transmitter-receiver pairs, or
links, that share a common channel, and address the problem of emptying finite
traffic volume from the transmitters in minimum time. This, so called,
minimum-time scheduling problem has been proved to be NP-hard in general. In
this paper, we study a class of minimum-time scheduling problems in which the
link rates have a particular structure consistent with the assumed environment
and topology. We show that global optimality can be reached in polynomial time
and derive optimality conditions. Then we consider a more general case in which
we apply the same approach and thus obtain approximation as well as lower and
upper bounds to the optimal solution. Simulation results confirm and validate
our approach.
