Semi-Persistent Scheduling for 5G Downlink Based on Short-Term Traffic Prediction

Qing He, György Dán, Georgios P. Koudouridis

Abstract: Efficient communication and computing resource allocation is becoming a fundamental issue in wireless networks. Efficiency is most often defined in terms of throughput, utilization and spectral efficiency, while the required computational effort is often overlooked. In this paper, we focus on efficient and computationally lightweight downlink scheduling, and we propose a semi-persistent scheduler based on adaptive short term traffic prediction. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduler in terms of throughput, fairness, latency, and scheduling complexity. Our numerical results show that scheduling with prediction is a promising approach in improving network performance. The proposed semi-persistent scheduler performs equally well in terms of throughput, fairness, and latency as traditional proportional-fair scheduling, but at a significantly reduced computational cost.