A comparative study of scheduling disciplines in 5G systems for emergency communications

The hugely increasing demand for mobile broadband access to Web-based services and APPs will soon challenge even the UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular technology and its advanced version LTE-A. For this reason the endeavor toward the Fifth Generation (5G) of cellular technology has started. Currently, there is no formal definition of 5G systems but they will encompass heterogeneity of radio technologies. System flexibility, (re)configuration and resilience will be indeed the catalysts of 5G. In this work, we delve different scheduling disciplines for communications of public safety users that are demanded to intervene during special events or in post disaster areas. In this extremely challenging environments we investigate which, out of several scheduling algorithms such as round-robin, proportional fair and others, performs better. Since public safety users must be regarded with sufficient capacity as well as in a fair manner, we devise a novel scheduling algorithm for public safety compromising the mentioned performance metrics. Through Matlab simulations we will show the performance of the different algorithms even mixing commercial and public safety users. Our results show that the proposed scheduler performs well in the cases we studied, making it a good candidate for future 5G networks.