System Level Analysis of Dynamic User-Centric Scheduling for a Flexible 5G Design

In this paper we present our latest findings on dynamic user-centric scheduling for a flexible 5G radio design, capable of serving users with highly diverse QoS requirements. The benefits of being able to schedule users with different transmission time intervals (TTIs) are demonstrated, in combination with a user-centric multiplexing of control and data channels. The proposed solution overcomes some of the shortcomings of LTE-Advanced in terms of scheduling flexibility and performance. In general it is found that using short TTIs is advantageous at low to medium offered traffic loads for TCP download to faster overcome the slow start phase, while at higher offered traffic loads the best performance is achieved with longer TTIs. Using longer TTI sizes results in less control overhead (from scheduling grants), and therefore higher spectral efficiency. The presented analysis leads to the conclusion that a future 5G design shall include support for dynamic scheduling with different TTI sizes to achieve the best performance.