Joint user plane function instance and base station scheduling in mobile networks

To guarantee a high data transmission rate in heterogeneous mobile networks, sufficient small base stations (SBSs) and user plane function (UPF) instances should be active. However, the excessive operation of SBSs and UPF instances can increase the operating expenditure (OPEX) for the network operator. To balance the data rate and OPEX, we propose a joint UPF instance–SBS scheduling algorithm (J-UBSA). In the proposed J-UBSA, a controller periodically determines the appropriate number of active SBSs and UPF instances based on estimated variations in session requests. The decision-making process is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process and converted into a linear programming model to obtain the optimal solution using a traditional algorithm with low complexity. Evaluation results demonstrate that J-UBSA can substantially reduce the OPEX while guaranteeing a suitable average data rate for mobile devices.