Lookback scheduling for long-term Quality-of-Service over multiple cells

In current cellular networks, schedulers allocate wireless channel resources to users based on short-term moving averages of the channel gain and of the queuing state. Using only such short-term information, schedulers ignore the user´s service history in previous cells and, thus, cannot meet long-term Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees when users traverse cells with varying load and capacity. We propose a new scheduling framework, which extends conventional short-term scheduling with long-term QoS information from previously traversed cells. We demonstrate our scheme for relevant channel-aware as well as for channel and queue-aware schedulers. Our simulation results show high gains in long-term QoS while the average throughput of the network increases. Therefore, the proposed scheduling approach improves subscriber satisfaction while increasing operational efficiency.