Reliability in future radio access networks: From linguistic to quantitative definitions

For the first time since the advent of mobile networks, the idea of advancing their pervasiveness by co-opting them into most aspects of daily life has taken hold and this idea is, henceforth, intended to be a mainstay of future networks (5G and beyond). As a result, a term one frequently encounters in the latest literature pertinent to radio access networks is reliability. It is, however, fairly evident that it is mostly used in a colloquial linguistic sense or that, in some cases, it is used synonymously with availability. This work is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to provide a quantitative definition of reliability which stems from its characterization in the dictionary and is based on quantifiable definitions of resilience, availability, and other parameters important to radio access networks. The utility of this quantitative definition is demonstrated by developing a reliability-aware scheduler which takes predictions of the channel quality into account. The scheduler developed here is also compared with the classical proportional fair scheduler in use today. This comparison not only succeeds in highlighting the practicality of the definition provided, but it also shows that the anticipatory reliability-aware scheduler is able to provide an improvement of about 35 - 50% in reliability when compared to a proportional fair scheduler which is common in contemporary use.