A game-theoretic approach to proportional fair resource sharing in 5G mobile networks

We propose a new approach for proportionally fair sharing of radio access resources (i.e., frequency carriers) in a 5G mobile environment. In particular, we formulate the multi-carrier scheduling problem as a game (played by different carriers) which results in proportionally fair user service rates at its equilibrium. We subsequently present a globally convergent algorithm to find the equilibrium point of the devised game, based on which we develop a frame-by-frame scheduling mechanism. We further discuss how to extend the proposed scheduling scheme to a multi-tenant setting in order to efficiently implement radio access network slicing in a 5G mobile system.