A novel scheduling technique for improving cell-edge performance in 4G/5G systems
Wael S. Afifi, Ali A. El‐Moursy, Mohamed Saad, Salwa M. Nassar, Hadia El‐Hennawy
Abstract
In cellular networks, users near the edge of the cell are usually suffering from low signal-to-noise-plus-interference-ratio (SINR) levels as a result from being far away from the base-station (BS). Many factors could lead to huge attenuation of the received signal in the cell-edge area such as path-loss and multipath fading. Increasing the BS transmit power is not always feasible as this could lead to an increased inter-cell-interference (ICI). Hence, the cell-edge problem arises. In this paper, a new scheduling technique has been developed to increase the probability of assigning the available resource blocks (RBs) to the cell-edge users so that their achieved throughput would increase. A performance comparison with state-of-the-art schedulers indicates that our proposed scheduling mechanism leads to a significant improvement in the average throughput for cell-edge users, with negligible performance degradation for cell-center users.