Fronthaul-Aware Software-Defined Joint Resource Allocation and User Scheduling for 5G Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fronthaul-aware SDN-based resource allocation and user scheduling scheme for 5G networks, optimizing throughput and delay by considering fronthaul constraints and employing game theory and Lyapunov optimization.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-timescale, fronthaul-aware resource management framework combining Lyapunov stochastic optimization and game theory for 5G SDN networks.

Findings

Significant throughput improvements over non-SDN baseline.

Noticeable delay reductions achieved.

Effective handling of fronthaul constraints in resource allocation.

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) is the concept of decoupling the control and data planes to create a flexible and agile network, assisted by a central controller. However, the performance of SDN highly depends on the limitations in the fronthaul which are inadequately discussed in the existing literature. In this paper, a fronthaul-aware software-defined resource allocation mechanism is proposed for 5G wireless networks with in-band wireless fronthaul constraints. Considering the fronthaul capacity, the controller maximizes the time-averaged network throughput by enforcing a coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE) and incentivizing base stations (BSs) to locally optimize their decisions to ensure mobile users' (MUs) quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. By marrying tools from Lyapunov stochastic optimization and game theory, we propose a two-timescale approach where the controller gives recommendations, i.e., sub-carriers with low interference, in a long-timescale whereas BSs schedule their own MUs and allocate the available resources in every time slot. Numerical results show considerable throughput enhancements and delay reductions over a non-SDN network baseline.