Dynamic Cell-Less Radio Access Network Meta-Scheduler for High System Capacity Increase

Radio resources are limited and subject to interferences, multi-path fading, shadowing and path-loss which highly impact the transmission efficiency. Optimizing the usage of these resources is the main issue in wireless networks. The resource management can be performed at different levels: in intracellular context, it is carried out by scheduling algorithms while in multi-cellular context, it is done by interference management strategies. This paper aims to merge these two steps. The proposed solution is compatible with the most acknowledged schedulers in order to optimize spectrum usage in intra-cell domain while efficiently decreasing the interferences in multicell domain. An innovative strategy is to consider the network as an "hyper-cell" rather than a sum of cells quite independent. This strategy often called "Cell-less" is especially effective in a Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture because it allows to centralize the decision making. This is more suitable for interference management as it provides a better flexibility to the system by retrieving and managing data from several cells that allows an overall performance increase. The proposed solution called Dynamic Cell-less Radio Access Network Meta-Scheduler (DC-RAN-MS) dynamically handles for each cell the management of radio resources depending on the interferences potentially experienced by users. Performance evaluation shows that the DC-RAN-MS offers an increased system capacity by optimizing the usage of bandwidth while reducing the magnitude of interferences received.