AN ENHANCED RESOURCE ALLOCATION SCHEME FOR LONG TERM EVOLUTION ADVANCED NETWORK

Abstract

The emerging Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) is an extended version of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) fourth-generation (4G) wireless broadband technologies that supports high speed transmission of multimedia applications, like video streaming, multimedia online game, Voice over IP (VoIP), browsing over the web etc. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not define a standard packet scheduling strategy in LTE-A. Therefore, it is expected for researchers and network service providers to design efficient schemes. This paper proposed an Enhanced Resource Allocation Scheme (E-RAS) that improves the packet scheduling strategy of LTE-A by addressing issues related to delay and fairness of users with both high and low channel conditions, for both Real Time (RT) and Non-Real Time (NRT) flows. The aim was achieved by using a fair spectrum allocation mechanism that consider the priority of RT flows of cell-centre users, without neglecting the throughput requirements of edge-centre users. Moreover, the proposed algorithm introduces an efficient traffic load balancing mechanism to efficiently regulate traffic load in LTE-A network. To evaluate the proposed scheme, simulation was conducted using the MATLAB programming with LTE-A system level simulator. The result obtained shows that the proposed scheme achieves better delay for RT and NRT traffics by 7% and 11% respectively as against the Resource Allocation Scheme to Optimize the Throughput (RASOT) scheme.