Evaluating Uplink Schedulers in LTE in Mixed Traffic Environments

Abstract

3GPP's Long Term Evolution is defined by the standardization body's Release 8 and 9, and provides more than a substrate for 3GPP's IMT-Advanced candidate, namely LTE-Advanced, which is due to be defined in Release 10. Both LTE and LTE-Advanced have SC-FDMA in their uplink, a multi-carrier access technique requiring contiguous subcarriers allocations for each UE. No scheduling algorithm, however, is dictated by the standard and several proposals have hence been presented to implemented by vendors. A definite scheduling requirement is the support of QoS attributes of different types of uplink traffic. Our intent in this study is evaluate the connection-level performance of representative scheduling proposals, with focus on QoS aspects. Specifically, we utilize a mixed type of traffic flows and evaluate the schedulers in terms of per-user throughput, delay, packet loss and fairness.