An enhanced joint scheduling scheme for GBR and non-GBR services in 5G RAN

Next 5G networks will support different kind of services covering a large number of use cases with very distinct quality of service (QoS) requirements. In particular, in enhanced mobile BroadBand usage scenarios, guaranteed bit rate (GBR) services with minimum GBR requirements and non-GBR services are provided. In the 5G radio access network, the data flows for these services are mapped into GBR data radio bearers (GBR DRBs) and non-GBR DRBs, respectively. This paper presents a new radio (NR) resource scheduling scheme designed to jointly manage this heterogeneous traffic in downlink OFDMA-based 5G NR. More specifically, our approach provides for a QoS aware joint scheduling framework, called enhanced joint scheduling (eJS) scheme, which aims at guaranteeing the minimum data rate requirements of accommodated data radio bearers. In this framework any chosen scheduling strategy can be implemented. In particular, we propose two different channel aware scheduling strategies, at the aim of being able to choose a different trade-off between the goals of maximizing the system throughput and reaching the fairness among DRBs. Moreover, the eJS scheme is designed to work well in realistic scenarios where non-ideal connection admission controls are adopted. We benchmark our eJS scheme against other existing scheduling schemes via a several number of simulations, under different traffic and channel conditions. The comparative analysis shows that our joint control scheme outperforms the reference schemes in terms of throughput and fairness, while satisfying a larger number of GBR DRBs.