Reducing Downlink Signaling Traffic in Wireless Systems Using Mobile-Assisted Scheduling

We present an idea to reduce the part of the downlink signaling traffic in wireless multiple access systems that contains scheduling information. The theoretical basis of the scheme is that the scheduling decisions made by the base station are correlated with the CSI reports from the mobiles. This correlation can be exploited by the source coding scheme that is used to compress the scheduling maps before they are sent to the mobiles. In the proposed scheme, this idea is implemented by letting the mobiles make tentative scheduling decisions themselves, and then letting the base station transmit "agreement maps" instead of raw scheduling maps to the mobiles. The agreement maps have lower entropy and they require less resources to be transmitted than the original scheduling maps do. The improvement can be substantial.