An Optimal and Priority Based Rate Guaranteed Radio Resource Allocation Scheme for LTE Downlink

Abstract

The problem of allocating radio resources for data transmission in the downlink of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems is studied. The scheduler present at the Evolved NodeB of the LTE network follows a specific scheduling algorithm to distribute the radio resources (available spectrum) among the users who request for carriers for data transmission. Generally scheduling algorithms aim at providing fairness, high throughput, reduced access delay, etc. Also with radio resource allocation/scheduling algorithms, different Modulation and Coding Schemes can be employed for different users in the same scheduling interval in order to achieve higher throughput. In this paper a new scheduling algorithm is proposed. The implementation of the proposed scheduling algorithm is followed with its comparison with the conventional scheduling algorithms like Round Robin, Best Channel Quality Indicator and Proportional Fair. In the proposed algorithm, the minimum data rate requirement of each user is taken into account. Two classes of users namely priority and non-priority users are considered. In this scenario, the algorithm is implemented in a way to satisfy the priority users first by allocating the available radio resources to them first and then allocating the remaining radio resources to the non-priority users. The algorithm also ensures optimized Resource Block (RB) allocation, so that users are allotted with minimum possible RBs required to satisfy their data rate requirement. The simulation results show that, compared to the conventional scheduling algorithms, the proposed algorithm performs well by efficient utilization of the scarce radio spectrum and in guaranteeing the rate requirement for the maximum number of active users especially to priority users.