A novel scheduling technique for improving cell-edge performance in 4G/5G systems

Abstract In cellular networks, users near the edge of the cell are usually suffering from low signal-to-noise-plus-interference-ratio (SINR) levels as a result from being far away from the base-station (BS). Many factors could lead to huge attenuation of the received signal in the cell-edge area such as path-loss and multipath fading. Increasing the BS transmit power is not always feasible as this could lead to an increased inter-cell-interference (ICI). Hence, the cell-edge problem arises. In this paper, a new scheduling technique has been developed to increase the probability of assigning the available resource blocks (RBs) to the cell-edge users so that their achieved throughput would increase. A performance comparison with state-of-the-art schedulers indicates that our proposed scheduling mechanism leads to a significant improvement in the average throughput for cell-edge users, with negligible performance degradation for cell-center users.