How Expensive is Consistency? Performance Analysis of Consistent Rate Provisioning to Mobile Users in Cellular Networks

Providing a consistent data rate to mobile users will be a very important feature of next generation systems, i.e., 5G, especially for services such as live video-streaming, online gaming, etc. This could lead to an increased user satisfaction with these services. In this paper, we perform the analysis to determine the maximum consistent data rate that can be offered to a (high paying) class of mobile users, both within a cell and within a region covered with multiple cells, given certain available resources. We do this for two cases: 1) when the number of active users in the class is constant, and 2) for a varying number of users being simultaneously present and active in the class. The analysis is performed under some independence assumptions, but we validate our results with extensive realistic simulations where the assumptions are relaxed. We show that providing consistent rate is rather expensive because a large percentage of the available resources remain unused most of the time. However, the unused resources can be shared (possibly equally) by the users in the group. In that case the consistent rate can be seen as a guaranteed minimum rate. The other option is to allocate the unused resources to a class of best effort users. We show that using any of these options will result in significant performance improvements.