ITFDS: Channel-Aware Integrated Time and Frequency-Based Downlink LTE Scheduling in MANET

Abstract

One of the crucial problems in Industry 4.0 is how to strengthen the performance of mobile communication within mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and mobile computational grids (MCGs). In communication, Industry 4.0 needs dynamic network connectivity with higher amounts of speed and bandwidth. In order to support multiple users for video calling or conferencing with high-speed transmission rates and low packet loss, 4G technology was introduced by the 3G Partnership Program (3GPP). 4G LTE is a type of 4G technology in which LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, followed to achieve 4G speeds. 4G LTE supports multiple users for downlink with higher-order modulation up to 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). With wide coverage, high reliability and large capacity, LTE networks are widely used in Industry 4.0. However, there are many kinds of equipment with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. In the existing LTE scheduling methods, the scheduler in frequency domain packet scheduling exploits the spatial, frequency, and multi-user diversity to achieve larger MIMO for the required QoS level. On the contrary, time-frequency LTE scheduling pays attention to temporal and utility fairness. It is desirable to have a new solution that combines both the time and frequency domains for real-time applications with fairness among users. In this paper, we propose a channel-aware Integrated Time and Frequency-based Downlink LTE Scheduling (ITFDS) algorithm, which is suitable for both real-time and non-real-time applications. Firstly, it calculates the channel capacity and quality using the channel quality indicator (CQI). Additionally, data broadcasting is maintained by using the dynamic class-based establishment (DCE). In the time domain, we calculate the queue length before transmitting the next packets. In the frequency domain, we use the largest weight delay first (LWDF) scheduling algorithm to allocate resources to all users. All the allocations would be taken placed in the same transmission time interval (TTI). The new method is compared against the largest weighted delay first (LWDF), proportional fair (PF), maximum throughput (MT), and exponential/proportional fair (EXP/PF) methods. Experimental results show that the performance improves by around 12% compared with those other algorithms.