Happy Bits Based BSR Mechanism in 5G Networks

Abstract

Being an important part of uplink dynamic scheduling, Buffer Status Report (BSR) has theoretical and practical significance for improving the resource utilization ratio of Long Term Evolution (LTE) system. Because uplink scheduler in base station is not directly aware of the UEs buffer content, the performance of its resource allocation strategy heavily relies on the accuracy of BSR feedback. However, the currently adopted non-uniform quantization mechanism for BSR, will inevitably cause considerable quantization error, thereby lead to an enormous waste of radio resources when large buffer size is taken into account. Therefore, this paper presents a revised BSR mechanism to improve the accuracy of BSR by fully utilizing two reserved bits, so called “Happy bits”, in MAC BSR control element’s sub-headers. Besides, this paper also proposes criteria to set those Happy bits. Simulation results show that, this new mechanism tremendously improve radio resource utilization ratio without introducing additional signalling overhead.