Two Step Scheduler for the Operator Sharing Case

Resource sharing between mobile network operators became very popular in the wireless market mainly to reduce operational costs. On top of both the existing infrastructure and wireless equipment sharing models the interest for a common use of rare radio frequency is increased as the mobile data demand increases exponentially. Operators can join by a sharing agreement among themselves a greater pool of frequency resources to serve their users with a higher quality of experience. This paper focuses on the enablement of radio resource scheduling taking into account an additional parameter: operator sharing ratio. Therefore a Two Step Scheduler (TSS) for the operator sharing case will be presented. The first step consists of scheduling the radio resources according agreed operator ratios and in a second step the radio resources will be assigned to the users of scheduled operator. In the results section the performance of such approach based on fairness, system rate and delay will be presented and discussed. Our main result is that a Two Step Scheduler maintains the specified operator resource sharing ratios keeping user performance values on the level of a non-sharing one operator scheduler from low load up to average system load.