Traffic-aware utility based QoS provisioning in OFDMA hybrid smallcells

Smallcell technology is gaining significance as part of the next-generation cellular systems due to their performance benefits in terms of increased network capacity and improved indoor and local coverage. Hybrid access smallcells, which provide service to both indoor as well as neighboring users, adopt adhoc policies to guarantee performance benefits to indoor home users in the presence of external neighboring users. Such policies must be able to stabilize user queues as well as to provision performance benefits in terms of delay and throughput, especially for the indoor users. As a result, classification of user data in terms of traffic type and user type is required to effectively achieve the differentiated QoS performance. In this paper, a traffic-aware utility function is proposed, which takes into account for the user's priority index and traffic characteristics to efficiently provide differentiated QoS benefits to users served under an OFDMA hybrid smallcell. The problem of the traffic-aware utility based scheduling under power constraints is posed as an optimization objective and an optimal algorithm for the scheduling problem is presented. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves QoS performance benefits in terms of throughput and delay.