Adaptive and Generic Scheduling Scheme for LTE/LTE-A Mobile Networks

Abstract

Schedulers for multi-carrier wireless networks are a central element of cellular systems and are subject to extensive research. However, state-of-the-art schedulers are hardly implementable in a real system such as long term evolution advanced (LTE-A), which imposes additional constraints on how resources are allocated. To address this problem, we first propose adaptive and generic scheduling scheme (AGSS) a generic resource allocation procedure that enables the implementation of state-of-the-art scheduling policies for building a LTE scheduler. In a second step, we propose our own scheduling policy called opportunistic PDOR aware (OPA) that both optimizes the use of the radio spectrum and provides the quality of service actually expected by applications. We show how to implement this policy using our generic scheduling scheme. We then compare the performance of AGSS to the classic scheme in a LTE environment when used with a given policy. We show that the proposed scheme outperforms the classic scheme whatever the policy. We also establish that OPA offers the best performances in terms of capacity and quality of service compared to state-of-the-art policies.