An efficient scheduling scheme for fronthaul load reduction in fog radio access networks

Fog radio access network (F-RAN) is one of the key technology that brings cloud computing benefit to the future of wireless communications for handling massive access and high volume of data traffic. The high fronthaul burden of a typical cellular system can be partially diminished by utilizing the storage and signal processing capabilities of the F-RANs, which is still not desirable as user throughput requirement is in the increasing trend with the increment of the internet of things (IoT) devices. This paper proposes an efficient scheduling scheme that minimizes the fronthaul load of F-RAN system optimally to improve user experience, and minimize latency. The scheduling scheme is modeled in a way that the scheduler which provides the lower fronthaul load while fulfilling the minimum user throughput requirement is selected for the data transmission process. Simulation results in terms of user selection fairness, outage probability, and fronthaul load for a different portion of user equipments (UEs) contents in fog access point (F-AP) are shown and compared with the most common scheduling scheme such as round robin (RR) scheme to validate the proposed method.