Resource Allocation for QoS Enforcement in 5G: Trading off Fairness and Delay-Awareness

Modern 5G networks support a wide range of services, from highly delay-sensitive vehicular communication to delay-tolerant FTP traffic. Efficient scheduling of the available radio resources is a key aspect in fulfilling these wide-ranging Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Legacy algorithms such as proportional fair and opportunistic scheduling do not help meet the delay requirements. This paper introduces a novel, single-parameter family of scheduling policies that can dynamically trade off fairness for criticality for various types of traffic. In particular, the proposed policy allocates resources based on the criticality of the traffic while maintaining an extent of fairness as dictated by the tunable hyperparameter. Extensive numerical simulations show that the proposed scheduling algorithm reduces timeouts significantly across a range of traffic and latency constraint scenarios.