QOS-AWARE DOWNLINK SCHEDULING ALGORITHM FOR LTE NETWORKS: A CASE STUDY ON EDGE USERS

Abstract

4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the state of the art wireless mobile broadband technology. It allows users to take advantage of high internet speeds. It makes use of the OFDM technology to offer high speed, which supplies the system resources both in time and frequency domain. The allocation of these resources is operated by a scheduling algorithm running on the base station. In this thesis, we investigate the performance of existing downlink scheduling algorithms in two ways. First we look at the performance of the algorithms in terms of throughput and fairness metrics. Second, we suggest a new fairness criterion, QoS-aware fairness which accepts that the system is fair if it can supply the users with the packet delays that they demand, and we evaluate the performance of the algorithms according to this metric. We also propose a new algorithm according to these two metrics, which especially increase the throughput gained by the edge users, the QoS-fairness, and classical fairness of the system without causing a big degradation in cell throughput when compared to other schedulers.