Channel-Aware and QoS-Aware Downlink Resource Allocation for Multi-numerology Based 5G NR Systems

The versatility and flexibility needed to support heterogeneous 5G usage scenarios involves the introduction of multi-numerology based 5G New Radio (NR) systems, where multiple frame structures with different sub-carrier spacing coexists in the same radio spectrum. Although this approach is efficient to cater a wide variety of services, it introduces a new issue in the radio resource allocation among the different non-orthogonal numerologies. This work introduces a new Quality of Service (QoS) aware Radio Resource Management (RRM) framework which schedules User Equipments (UEs) requiring Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) services with different priorities, or non-GBR services. In order to maximize the spectral efficiency and, consequently, the system throughput, this framework consists of two channel-aware control levels. The first level provides a dynamic subdivision of the spectrum among the various numerologies, while the second one schedules the Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) to the UEs belonging to the same numerology. In this paper, we propose a new 1st level allocation algorithm, called Channel-Aware Resource Allocation for Multi-numerology (CARAM), which aims to maximize the system throughput and the amount of satisfied users, taking into account the priority. As 2nd control level, we exploit well-known scheduling algorithms. We benchmark our approach against other existing 1st level allocation algorithms via several system-level simulations, under different traffic loads and channel conditions. The comparative analysis shows that our RRM framework outperforms the reference schemes in terms of system throughput, while guaranteeing a larger number of GBR services with high priority.