Unified scheduling framework for dual connectivity in multi-RAT NSA 5G networks

Abstract

Supporting the dual connectivity technology in non-stand-alone 5G scenarios involves three main functionalities: a user device (UD)-base station (BS) association (UBA) mechanism, a flow control algorithm (FCA) to determine the data split transmitted by each BS and radio resource management (RRM) algorithms. However, previous works only focused on the design of at most two of these functionalities. In this letter, we go beyond and design a unified scheduling framework including the three aforementioned functionalities. The proposed framework targets the user satisfaction maximization and runs in a completely decentralized fashion, where the UBA algorithm runs independently at each UD, the FCA is executed at the master LTE BS and the RRM is performed individually by each BS. Simulations show the incremental gains of each proposed functionality as well as the total gain of the unified framework.