A downlink scheduler supporting real time services in LTE cellular networks

Abstract

The wide spread of real-time services in wireless networks demands scheduling mechanisms supporting strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Nevertheless, the specifications of the LTE standard for mobile connectivity defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not impose any specific scheduler for the proper allocation of resources to services. Therefore, several LTE schedulers have been proposed in the literature meeting the QoS requirements of modern services. In this paper a QoS aware scheduler for the LTE downlink is proposed namely the FLS-Advanced (FLSA) aiming at prioritizing real-time traffic. The proposed scheduler has been built on three distinct levels assigning the available radio resources to services according to their requirements. Based on simulation results, the FLSA outperforms in terms of packet loss ratio, attainable throughput and fairness the performance of existing schedulers including PF, MLWDF, EXP/PF, FLS, EXP RULE and LOG RULE.