Efficient Resource Allocation With Provisioning Constrained Rate Variability in Cellular Networks

While LTE networks are known to provide relatively high data rates, reaching values as high as tens of Mbps, these rates exhibit considerable variability over time. The rate variability hurts especially the performance of applications and services that require stable data rates, such as real-time video streaming, online gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc. 5G emerged as a solution to this as well as to many other problems. However, it has been shown that strict constant data rates come at the cost of underutilized network resources, resulting in inefficient operation of cellular networks. Therefore, a tradeoff between the data rate stability, important to cellular users, and the efficient utilization of resources, important to network operators, needs to be taken into account. To that end, in this paper, we consider the problem of allocating all the network resources to cellular users in such a way that it provides as high a data rate as possible to all users while limiting the rate variation within tight bounds. We do this for different scenarios in terms of the user activity, user type, and the nature of the policy. First, we consider the case of static allocation policy, irrespective of channel conditions, for users that are always active. Then, for these same users, we look at the case when resources are allocated dynamically over time. Second, we consider static and dynamic policies for users that are only intermittently active. Third, we consider the case with users having different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the cellular operator. Furthermore, we run extensive simulations with input parameters from real traces. Results show that allocating the resources dynamically improves performance in terms of data rates over static allocation mechanisms by an additional 10%, and that allowing a slightly higher outage in not complying with the guaranteed data rate further increases the user's throughput by at least 20%.