Joint Scheduling of Low-Latency and Best-Effort Flows in 5G Wireless Networks

Emerging 5G networks will play a critical role in enabling a wide range of novel applications through Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) capabilities besides offering even higher throughput to enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services. Supporting an increasingly heterogeneous set of performance requirements raises a strong need for innovative resource allocation mechanisms which achieve yet greater spectral efficiency and allow for highly agile transmissions, e.g. through puncturing of mini-slots. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce and analyze various joint scheduling schemes which aim to optimize throughput utility for eMBB flows while satisfying the delay requirements of URLLC flows and specifically accounting for channel variations over time and across frequencies. We show how the throughput dynamics of eMBB users can be described in the presence of puncturing of mini-slots for URLLC transmissions, and make several comparisons in terms of overall throughput performance and implementation complexity.