Project 4: Multi-user Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

Multi-user communication techniques such as non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) have emerged as one of the key enabling technologies for 5G wireless networks.  The objective of the scheduler is to maximize the system utility (e.g. system throughput) subject to the users' individual demand constraints, e.g. minimum utility demands or temporal demands. Schedulers which satisfy minimum utility demand constraints ensure that each individual user is allocated a fraction of the system throughput which is in agreement with their corresponding quality of service demands. Temporal demand constraints are considered in order to control the average latency in delay sensitive applications and to manage power consumption in the users' devices.

In this project, we consider multi-user scheduling under temporal, proportional, and utilitarian fairness constraints. We have shown that under practical scenarios, multi-user scheduling techniques such as NOMA scheduling lead to significant improvements compared to single user scheduling techniques such as orthogonal multiple-access (OMA) scheduling in terms of system throughput. The objective of this research project is to (i) provide a general framework for multi-user scheduling which is applicable under arbitrary utility function and various user quality of service constraints, (ii) uncover the fundamental limits of multi-user scheduling such as maximum achievable throughput through analytical characterization of the throughput function, and (iii) provide practical low-complexity algorithms for near-optimal scheduling and verify their effectiveness under practical static and mobile scenarios using numerical simulations of cellular networks.