Scheduling and Resource Allocation for Heterogeneous Traffic in LTE-A Networks

Abstract

Mobile communication networks are experiencing a significant growth in data traffic, posing challenges to the overall systems that should become more adaptive towards evolving changes in traffic and network conditions. Long term evolution advanced (LTE-Advanced), also called International Mobile Telecommunications advanced (IMT-Advanced) is a recent mobile technology approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as the fourth generation of the mobile communication system. And since then, it has become the first choice of the operators when constructing the new network infrastructure, due to its high throughput and low latency. However, as the number of mobile users are increasing exponentially, it is proving to be costly to share the scarce resources considering the rapid growth of wireless services plus increasing demand for bandwidth. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of the system to ensure that it is utilised efficiently. The key radio resource management mechanisms are user scheduling and resource allocation methods that are suitable to each user for transmission of the downlink from the base station through the air interface for each mobile user. The objectives of this research thesis are to study and analyze the existing scheduling and resource allocation in LTE-Advanced and find an optimized scheduling algorithm to fully utilise the features of LTE-Advanced. A new scheduling algorithm is proposed with an improvement to the existing algorithms to improve the performance. The effects of the changes are evaluated using the Vienna LTE Simulator. In this thesis, the round robin and proportional fair resource allocation schemes have been considered. The key contribution of this thesis work is to propose a new scheduling algorithm that improves the throughput and the fairness by applying conducive parameters of LTE-Advanced. Proposed algorithm improves system capacity as compared to round robin and proportional fair. The recommended ITU Pedestrian B and MIMO systems have been used to evaluate the algorithms for increased throughput.