Abstract: Disclosed herein are scheduling techniques for transmitting time-critical data in a cost-aware manner over a network comprising a plurality of heterogeneous transmission interfaces. The scheduling problem is formulated as a linear programming problem with the deliver-by deadlines of the various data blocks as hard constraints and minimizing cost set as an objective (soft) constraint. The problem is simplified by assuming data blocks with the earliest deadlines should be scheduled first and the most aggressive interfaces should be used first. To formulate the linear programming problem, the time domain is divided into bins and various bin-level schedules are enumerated for switching the transmission of the data over various transmission interfaces. The linear programming techniques are applied to the various bin configurations and the least costly of the resulting transmission schedule is selected for submission to a switching layer.