Proportionally Fair Resource Allocation in SD-RAN

The introduction of Software-Defined Radio Access Networks in 5G, whose main feature is the possibility of decoupling the control plane from the data plane, and associating the former with a controller away from base stations, represents a paradigm shift in the way the network resources are allocated. This property provides an increased flexibility in cellular network operation, yielding significant improvements compared to the pre-5G resource allocation era. However, the full extent to which this amelioration ranges is not yet clear for different metrics of interest and objectives. One such objective is to allocate resources so that proportional fairness is achieved. Therefore, in this paper, we consider analytically the problem of proportionally fair allocation in SD-RAN environments, by deriving the policy which accomplishes that. We do this for two scenarios. In the first, the goal is to provide proportional fairness across all the users in the network, whereas in the second, the objective is to provide proportionally fair allocation in terms of the throughput of all BSs. We evaluate the performance with input parameters from a real trace. Results show that the introduction of SD-RAN increases the value of the objective by up to an order of magnitude compared to the scenario with no SD-RAN.