Performance Guarantees of Cellular Networks with Hardcore Regulation and Scheduling

2026-02-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the provision of provable link-level performance guarantees in the downlink of cellular networks by incorporating hard-core spatial constraints—enforcing a minimum distance between base stations—and base station scheduling mechanisms. Leveraging spatial network calculus and hard-core point process modeling, the work presents the first joint analysis of how spatial constraints and scheduling jointly shape interference, deriving a rigorous upper bound on the total interference power. It further identifies explicit system parameter conditions under which scheduling outperforms the fully active baseline. A specialized analytical treatment for hexagonal cellular networks reveals practical pathways to simultaneously achieve target rate guarantees and reduced power consumption, thereby offering theoretical foundations for the design of low-power, high-performance cellular systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Other Foundations of Constraint Satisfaction
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs

Abstract

Providing performance guarantees is one of the critical objectives of recent and future communication networks, toward which regulations, i.e., constraints on key system parameters, have played an indispensable role. This is the case for large wireless communication networks, where spatial regulations (e.g., constraints on intercell distance) have recently been shown, through a spatial network calculus, to be essential for establishing provable wireless link-level guarantees. In this work, we focus on performance guarantees for the downlink of cellular networks where we impose a hardcore (spatial) regulation on base station (BS) locations and evaluate how BS scheduling (which controls which BSs can transmit at a given time) impacts performance. Hardcore regulation is the simplest form of spatial regulation that enforces a minimal distance between any pair of transmitters in the network. Within this framework of spatial network calculus, we first provide an upper bound on the power of total interference for a spatially regulated cellular network, and then, identify the regimes where scheduling BSs yields better link-level rate guarantees compared to scenarios where base stations are always active. The hexagonal cellular network is analyzed as a special case. The results offer insights into what spatial regulations are needed, when to choose scheduling, and how to potentially reduce the network power consumption to provide a certain target performance guarantee.

Problem

• performance guarantees
• cellular networks
• hardcore regulation
• base station scheduling
• spatial regulation

Innovation

• hardcore regulation
• spatial network calculus
• base station scheduling
• interference bound
• performance guarantee