In this paper we consider a scenario in which a set of source nodes wishes to transmit real-time data packets periodically to a central controller over lossy wireless links, while using a TDMA-based medium access control protocol. Furthermore, a number of relay nodes are present which can help the source nodes with packet retransmissions. The key question we consider in this paper is how to schedule the TDMA slots for retransmissions while taking advantage of the relay nodes, so that the average number of packets missing their deadlines is minimized. We provide a problem formulation for the general deadline-aware TDMA relay scheduling problem. Since the design space of the general problem is large, we also present one particular class of restricted TDMA relay scheduling problems. We suggest and numerically investigate a range of algorithms and heuristics, both optimal and suboptimal, of the restricted scheduling problem, which represent different trade-offs between achievable performance and computational complexity. Specifically, we introduce two different Markov Decision Process (MDP) based formulations for schedule computation of the restricted TDMA relay scheduling problem. One MDP formulation gives an optimal schedule, another (approximate) formulation gives a sub-optimal schedule which, however, comes very close to the optimal performance at much more modest computational and memory costs. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.