  Motivated by the increasing importance of providing delay-guaranteed services
in general computing and communication systems, and the recent wide adoption of
learning and prediction in network control, in this work, we consider a general
stochastic single-server multi-user system and investigate the fundamental
benefit of predictive scheduling in improving timely-throughput, being the rate
of packets that are delivered to destinations before their deadlines. By
adopting an error rate-based prediction model, we first derive a Markov
decision process (MDP) solution to optimize the timely-throughput objective
subject to an average resource consumption constraint. Based on a packet-level
decomposition of the MDP, we explicitly characterize the optimal scheduling
policy and rigorously quantify the timely-throughput improvement due to
predictive-service, which scales as
$\Theta(p\left[C_{1}\frac{(a-a_{\max}q)}{p-q}\rho^{\tau}+C_{2}(1-\frac{1}{p})\right](1-\rho^{D}))$,
where $a, a_{\max}, \rho\in(0, 1), C_1>0, C_2\ge0$ are constants, $p$ is the
true-positive rate in prediction, $q$ is the false-negative rate, $\tau$ is the
packet deadline and $D$ is the prediction window size. We also conduct
extensive simulations to validate our theoretical findings. Our results provide
novel insights into how prediction and system parameters impact performance and
provide useful guidelines for designing predictive low-latency control
algorithms.
