Proactive Resource Allocation: Harnessing the Diversity and Multicast Gains

TL;DR

This paper proposes a proactive resource allocation framework that leverages user behavior predictability to enhance wireless network efficiency, improve diversity gains, and enable super-linear scaling in multicast scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel proactive resource allocation model exploiting user prediction, analyzes its benefits using large deviation theory, and demonstrates significant improvements in diversity gains and multicast scalability.

Findings

Prediction-based resource allocation increases outage decay rate.

Proactive multicast achieves super-linear diversity gain scaling.

Secondary networks benefit without affecting primary network performance.

Abstract

This paper introduces the novel concept of proactive resource allocation through which the predictability of user behavior is exploited to balance the wireless traffic over time, and hence, significantly reduce the bandwidth required to achieve a given blocking/outage probability. We start with a simple model in which the smart wireless devices are assumed to predict the arrival of new requests and submit them to the network T time slots in advance. Using tools from large deviation theory, we quantify the resulting prediction diversity gain} to establish that the decay rate of the outage event probabilities increases with the prediction duration T. This model is then generalized to incorporate the effect of the randomness in the prediction look-ahead time T. Remarkably, we also show that, in the cognitive networking scenario, the appropriate use of proactive resource allocation by the primary users improves the diversity gain of the secondary network at no cost in the primary network diversity. We also shed lights on multicasting with predictable demands and show that the proactive multicast networks can achieve a significantly higher diversity gain that scales super-linearly with T. Finally, we conclude by a discussion of the new research questions posed under the umbrella of the proposed proactive (non-causal) wireless networking framework.