Scheduling for Improving System Capacity in Multiservice 3GPP LTE

Abstract

We study the impact of scheduling algorithms on the provision of multiple services in the long term evolution (LTE) system. In order to measure how well the services are provided by the system, we use the definition of joint system capacity. In this context, we claim that scheduling strategies should consider the current satisfaction level of each service and the offered load to the system by each service. We propose a downlink-scheduling strategy according to these ideas named capacity-driven resource allocation (CRA). The CRA scheduler dynamically controls the resource sharing among flows of different services such as delay-sensitive and rate demanding ones. Moreover, CRA scheduler exploits the channel-quality knowledge to utilize the system resources efficiently. Simulation results in a multicell scenario show that the CRA scheduler is robust regarding channel quality knowledge and that it provides significant gains in joint system capacity in single and mixed service scenarios.