SLA: Speed and Location Aware LTE Scheduler for Vehicular Safety Applications

Vehicular safety applications are based on broadcasting of safety messages to the neighboring vehicles. As LTE is an infrastructure-based network, vehicles cannot broadcast their safety messages directly to their neighbors; thus, all messages should pass through the infrastructure. However, these messages may congest the network and lead to high delays for some vehicles. Furthermore, in vehicular safety applications, faster vehicles are more sensitive to delay, since their positions change more frequently than slower vehicles within the same time frame. Therefore faster vehicles should be assigned a higher priority to send messages in order to have low delay. Existing LTE schedulers do not consider this factor when allocating resources. This leads to high delays and unacceptable position errors for faster vehicles. In this paper we propose a Speed and Location Aware (SLA) scheduler for LTE which is suitable for vehicular applications. SLA scheduler considers the speed and location of vehicles in order to assign priorities for resource allocation. Faster vehicles receive priority for the allocation of Physical Resource Blocks (PRB). Simulation results show that SLA scheduler outperforms existing algorithms by preventing high delays and large position errors for faster vehicles.