Context-aware scheduling of joint millimeter wave and microwave resources for dual-mode base stations

One of the most promising approaches to overcome the drastic channel variations of millimeter wave (mmW) communications is to deploy dual-mode base stations that integrate both mmW and microwave (pW) frequencies. Reaping the benefits of a dual-mode operation requires scheduling mechanisms that can allocate resources efficiently and jointly at both frequency bands. In this paper, a novel resource allocation framework is proposed that exploits users' context, in terms of user application (UA) delay requirements, to maximize the quality-of-service (QoS) of a dual-mode base station. In particular, such a context-aware approach enables the network to dynamically schedule UAs, instead of users, thus providing more precise delay guarantees and a more efficient exploitation of the mmW resources. The scheduling of UAs is formulated as a one-to-many matching problem between UAs and resources and a novel algorithm is proposed to solve it. The proposed algorithm is shown to converge to a two-sided stable matching between UAs and network resources. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms classical CSI-based scheduling in terms of the per UA QoS, yielding up to 36% improvement. The results also show that exploiting mmW resources provides significant traffic offloads reaching up to 43% from μW band.