Proactive Resource Allocation for the Coexistence of Concurrent Services

This paper investigates proactive resource allocation methods in a downlink cellular network, where two coexisting application types compete for the limited wireless communication resources. In particular, mission-critical and broadband services demand communication resources at the same time, where the mission-critical applications are of higher priority. We formulate an optimization problem that allows to trade off interruptions and data rate of the broadband services under the constraint that the demand for mission-critical resources is always satisfied. We propose an online algorithm to approach the problem, and we compare it with a state-of-the-art algorithm. Moreover, we investigate the influence of different assumptions on available information about future channel states. The investigated methods leverage predicted demand and channel states in order to guarantee successful mission-critical communication under any circumstances, while maximizing the quality of experience for broadband services. Simulations in a realistic V2X scenario verify that the proposed algorithm can reduce the duration of service interruptions compared to the baseline approach. The results show that the quality of broadband services can be significantly improved at the cost of only a marginal increase in interruptions, by appropriately weighting the two objectives. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm demonstrates a high robustness in the case of uncertainties in the channel prediction.