Dynamic Adjustment of Scheduling Period in Mobile Networks Based on C-RAN

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is considered as one of the compelling architectures to meet requirements of the future mobile networks in term of delivering cutting-edge applications and increasing the network flexibility. However, one of the key challenges to cope with in the C-RAN is the fronthaul delay between the baseband unit (BBU) and remote radio head (RRH). The fronthaul delay impacts negatively on various radio resource management techniques including scheduling. The scheduling suffers from the fronthaul due to an additional delay between the time when inputs for the scheduling are provided by the users and the time when the new scheduling is applied. In this paper, we propose a dynamic adjustment of the centralized scheduling period aiming to suppress the negative impact of the fronthaul delay and to increase the network throughput. To this end, we propose two algorithms estimating the scheduling period for individual users: i) from previous channel quality information, and ii) via a prediction of the future channel quality. Simulation results show that both proposed solutions not only provide a network throughput close to the theoretical upper bound but also outperform existing approaches.