QoS-aware downlink packet scheduling for LTE networks

Abstract

Scheduling for flows has been studied before. However, applying the previous schemes directly for LTE networks may not achieve good performance. To have good performance, both frequency domain allocations and time domain allocations for LTE resource blocks are suggested. Our method is suitable for real-time services and it consists of three phases. In frequency domain we design our method to utilize the RBs effectively. In time domain we first manage queues for different applications and propose a mechanism for predicting the packet delays. We introduce the concept of virtual queue to predict the behavior of future incoming packets based on the packets in the current queue. Then based on the calculated results, we introduce a cut-in process to rearrange the transmission order and discard those packets which cannot meet their delay requirements. We compare our scheduling mechanism with maximum throughput, proportional fair, modified largest delay first and exponential proportional fair. Simulation results show our scheduling method can achieve better performance than other schemes.