Inter-cellular scheduler for 5G wireless networks

Enhancing the Quality of Experience (QoE) in wireless networks is a crucial issue. Many acknowledged works focus on intra-cellular scheduling. They have shown that when the channel impairment is taken into consideration by the opportunistic scheduling approaches, it allows to reach higher throughputs and, for the most efficient ones, a higher fairness. However, if some of these works provide results near to optimum considering a single cell, high QoE cannot be guaranteed for scenarios where the cells are overloaded. In this article, we propose a new inter-cellular scheduler able to help the overloaded cells thanks to a dynamic cell bandwidth allocation. Our resource allocation technique is based on an adequate emergency parameter called Mean Cell Packet Delay Outage Ratio (MCPDOR). Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheduler widely outperforms existing solutions in various scenarios. A variant of our solution that does not consider MCPDOR is also proposed and evaluated.