Managing Quality of Service Through Intelligent Scheduling in Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks

Small Cells are being deployed alongside pre-existing Macro Cells in order to satisfy demand during the current era of exponential growth in mobile traffic. Heterogeneous networks are economical because both cell tiers share the same scarce and expensive spectrum. However, customers at cell edges experience severe cross-tier interference in channel sharing Het-Nets, resulting in poor service quality. Techniques for improving fairness globally have been developed in previous works. In this paper, a novel method for service differentiation at the level of individual customers is proposed. The proposed algorithm redistributes spectrum on a millisecond timescale, so that premium customers experience minimum downlink rates exceeding a target threshold. System level simulations indicate that downlink rate targets of at least 1 [Mbps] are always satisfied under the proposed scheme. By contrast, naive scheduling achieves the 1 [Mbps] target only 83% of the time. Quality of service can be improved for premium customers without significantly impacting global fairness metrics. Flexible service differentiation will be key to effectively monetizing the next generation of 5G wireless communications networks.