Operations Research in a Millisecond: Real-Time Resource Optimization for Mobile Networks

Operations research (OR) for mobile communications at millisecond scale: doable or fantasy?

Although the engineering research community has devoted efforts to resource optimization in 4G/5G, the research falls short on examining optimality gap and demonstrating real-time use.

For OR, the topic is truly challenging, as mobile systems are becoming increasingly complex, making it hard for modeling.

Moreover, problem-solving in a millisecond is not what OR has conventionally been dealing with.Targeting a millisecond for large-scale networks would be naive.

A major complexity originates from that the network elements, here base stations (BSs), are inherently coupled due to interference.

A much more viable approach is centralized optimization for inter-BS resource allocation with estimated input that is valid on a time scale of a few seconds, followed by distributed intra-BS optimization on the millisecond scale.

To this end, the novelties of the proposal consist of new mathematical modeling and insights of structural properties, to demonstrate why OR in a millisecond will work.The research proposal is rooted in OR, with a deep understanding of mobile networks.

We outline our groundwork, notions, and concepts, for system modeling, mathematical modeling, and inter- and intra-BS optimization.

Putting these thrusts together, the proposal sketches a roadmap to bring real-time optimization into reach, with the impact of new, fundamental achievements of OR beyond the state-of-the-art.