Machine Learning-Based Uplink Scheduling Approaches for Mixed Traffic in Cellular Systems

The problem of the uplink resource allocation of mixed-traffic types in cellular networks is a challenging problem that has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature. In this paper, we consider the 5G uplink scheduling for Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications and enhanced Mobile Broad-Band (eMBB) traffic types. There are three main scheduling techniques to be considered, namely, the grant-based (GB), the semi-persistent, and the grant-free (GF) techniques. Furthermore, there are three different schemes used in GF scheduling, namely, the reactive, the k-repetitions, and the proactive schemes. We devise a mathematical model for the GF services using the k-repetitions scheme as the first model to define such traffic in a single cell. In addition, the GB scheduling model for eMBB traffic is adapted to fit our problem. We formulate the scheduling problem as a mixed-integer non-linear programming optimization problem. We introduce a complete system model that includes GF and GB subsystems. We introduce a novel mixed scheduler that combines the advantages of two well-known schedulers in the literature. We introduce novel machine-learning-based scheduling algorithms and evaluate them in comparison to well-known algorithms in the literature in addition to the optimal bound that we also derive. The results show that the proposed algorithms produce near-optimal results in real time.