Optimizing Bandwidth Sharing for Real-time Traffic in Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a dynamic bandwidth sharing and scheduling policy for wireless networks to improve real-time traffic delivery, providing theoretical guarantees and demonstrating up to 90% performance gains through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel sharing and scheduling policy with strong theoretical guarantees for real-time traffic in wireless networks.

Findings

Up to 90% improvement in real-time traffic capacity.

Performance depends on sharing amount and traffic characteristics.

Policy is validated through extensive simulations.

Abstract

We consider the problem of enhancing the delivery of real-time traffic in wireless networks using bandwidth sharing between operators. A key characteristic of real-time traffic is that a packet has to be delivered within a delay deadline for it to be useful. The abundance of real-time traffic is evident in the popularity of applications like video and audio conferencing, which increased significantly during the COVID-19 period. We propose a sharing and scheduling policy which involves dynamically sharing a portion of one operator's bandwidth with another operator. We provide strong theoretical guarantees for the policy. We also evaluate its performance via extensive simulations, which show significant improvements of up to 90% in the ability to carry real-time traffic when using the policy. We also explore how the improvements from bandwidth sharing depend on the amount of sharing, and on additional traffic characteristics.