Efficient and Dual SIM Aware Resource Scheduler for 5G and Future Networks

Abstract

5G (Fifth Generation) wireless technology introduced a paradigm shift in the way networks are designed to provide services. Unlike 4G (Fourth Generation) which is primarily focusing on achieving high data rates, 5G networks are expected to support varying uses cases as captured in [5]. In order to support these services more efficiently with the allotted spectrum capacity, the most important challenge is to design an optimal physical resource scheduling algorithms which maximizes resource utilization and minimizes resource wastage. The widely used resource scheduling algorithms like Proportional Fair (PF) and Round Robin (RR) are designed to work effectively only for single SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) mobile phones also referred as UE (User Equipment). However, large population is already using UEs that support DSDS (Dual SIM Dual Standby) feature and numbers are increasing. Hence, enhancing these algorithms only to support additional use cases defined in 5G would not suffice to solve the problem of resource wastage. As the 5G network is primarily designed to provide services to Single SIM (SS) UEs, the above mentioned algorithms allocates resources to DSDS UEs in a similar fashion to SS UEs even though DSDS UEs may not be utilizing these resources due to the nature of dual SIM operation. As the network is not aware of dual SIM operation, it continues to allocate resources leading to lot of resource wastage. To overcome this stated problem, we propose a novel network resource scheduler called DANS DANS (Dual SIM Aware Network Scheduler) which modifies the conventional PF and RR algorithms to enhance their performance. The proposed DANS detect the outage in the active communication of all DSDS UEs with network and reduce resource allocation to such DSDS UEs to negligible levels till the duration of outage. In case of DSDS UEs, this outage refers to interruption in active communication of one SIM due to usage of communication hardware by other SIM. We simulated DANS in NS-3 setup and its performance is compared with schedulers with uses conventional PF and RR algorithms.