Split Responsibility Scheduler for Multi-Connectivity in 5G Cellular Networks

The success of 5G networks relies on well-designed scheduling strategies that can tackle the increasing complexity of emerging mobile networks. Consequently, scheduling solutions are becoming more complicated, requiring high computational power and communication with very low latency. in this context, this work studies how to enhance existing scheduling solutions considering cellular networks with multi-connectivity, where users can have two or more simultaneous connections to different cells. Starting with a literature overview, we identify the main drawbacks of existing scheduling solutions for multi-connectivity scenarios. Then, we propose a novel scheduling concept that simplifies the scheduling task and overcomes several issues of existing scheduling solutions. The proposed solution logically splits the existing scheduling responsibilities across two simpler entities, thus it is named SRS. Furthermore, we propose a scheduling algorithm for practical SRS deployments, which is suitable for current and future multi-connectivity scenarios. Simulations show that the proposed solution has near-optimal performance in 5G multi-connectivity scenarios, when running in centralized and distributed architectures, while outperforming existing solutions by increasing the minimum user rate by 95 percent and the percentage of satisfied users by 50 percent at high system loads.