Scheduling for Multi-users Multiplexing Radio Voice Transmission for enhancing voice capacity over LTE in PMR context

Abstract

Despite the fact that Long Term Evolution (LTE) supports high-speed data transmission and supports different packet sizes by using Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC), LTE is not yet optimized for low bit rate voice communication, especially in case of using LTE in Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) context. In LTE, one pair of Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) is the smallest User Assignment Unit. However, the smallest LTE packet size is still too large in case that low bit rate voice communication is transmitted in high Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS). This reduces the voice capacity over LTE in PMR context. Therefore, we propose a new Multi-users Multiplexing Radio Voice Transmission method for enhancing voice capacity over LTE in PMR context. In this method, voice packets from different users are multiplexed into one LTE packet in the downlink transmission. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling method that can be used to transmit the multiplexed packets to corresponding users. This paper gives also a novel algorithm for classifying and grouping voice packets of mobile users having different MCS values. In case of low and medium number of users, the results show that the average voice capacity gain of the proposed method can rise up to 89.6%. In case of high number of users, the proposed method can improve the voice capacity by factor of 6.5.