A key feature of the packet scheduler in LTE system is that it can allocate resources both in the time and frequency domain. Furthermore, the scheduler is acquainted with channel state information periodically reported by user equipments either in an aggregate form for the whole downlink channel, or distinguished for each available subchannel. This mechanism allows for wide discretion in resource allocation, thus promoting the flourishing of several scheduling algorithms, with different purposes. It is therefore of great interest to compare the performance of such algorithms in different scenarios. A very common simulation tool that can be used for this purpose is ns-3, which already supports a set of well known scheduling algorithms for LTE downlink, though it still lacks schedulers that provide throughput guarantees. In this work we contribute to fill this gap by implementing a scheduling algorithm that provides long-term throughput guarantees to the different users, while opportunistically exploiting the instantaneous channel fluctuations to increase the cell capacity. We then perform a thorough performance analysis of the different scheduling algorithms by means of extensive ns-3 simulations, both for saturated UDP and TCP traffic sources. The analysis makes it possible to appreciate the difference among the scheduling algorithms, and to assess the performance gain, both in terms of cell capacity and packet service time, obtained by allowing the schedulers to work on the frequency domain.
In a nutshell, there has been a growing interest in the design and performance comparison of the scheduling algorithms for LTE taking into account both the UDP and TCP traffic. However, the comparison with opportunistic but users' fair schedulers, capable of providing throughput guarantees to users while exploiting the specific resource allocation structure of LTE, has not been carried out. Secondly, although several well-known scheduling algorithms are already implemented in @math @cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_7 but to the best of our knowledge, QoS aware schedulers which provide fair throughput guarantees to the users and take into account the LTE resource allocation framework have not yet been implemented in @math . This paper aims at filling these gaps.
@cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_7
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In LTE systems, the downlink scheduler is an essential component for efficient radio resource utilization; hence, in the context of LTE simulation, the availability of good downlink scheduler models is very important. At the time this work started, the LTE module of the ns-3 simulator only supported two types of scheduler, namely Round Robin and Proportional Fair. To overcome this limitation, we implemented in ns-3 several well-known downlink LTE scheduler algorithms, namely maximum throughput, throughput to average, blind equal throughput, token bank fair queue and priority set. In this paper, we first describe in detail their design and implementation, and then discuss their validation done by comparison with the theoretical performance in some reference scenarios. Packet scheduler at the medium access control (MAC) layer is essential to improve radio resource utilization in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. The MAC scheduler allocates resource blocks to user terminals (UEs) according to the priority metric, which varies in different scheduling algorithms. Although there have been many studies on the performance of LTE schedulers at the MAC layer, it is interesting to evaluate the impact of different LTE MAC schedulers on the transport layer, particularly on the transmission control protocol (TCP). In this study, we implement three mainstream LTE MAC schedulers in Network Simulator-3 (NS-3), namely, maximum throughput (MT), blind equal throughput (BET) and proportional fair (PF). Extensive simulations are conducted to examine the different TCP throughput achieved with the frequency domain version and the time domain version of these schedulers in a vehicular environment. The performance difference is attributed to important factors such as the resource allocation granularity, channel-awareness in scheduling, and the number of UEs. Designing scheduling algorithms that work in synergy with TCP is a challenging problem in wireless networks. Extensive research on scheduling algorithms has focused on inelastic traffic, where there is no correlation between traffic dynamics and scheduling decisions. In this work, we study the performance of several scheduling algorithms in LTE networks, where the scheduling decisions are intertwined with wireless channel fluctuations to improve the system throughput. We use ns-3 simulations to study the performance of several scheduling algorithms with a specific focus on Max Weight (MW) schedulers with both UDP and TCP traffic, while considering the detailed behavior of OFDMA-based resource allocation in LTE networks. We show that, contrary to its performance with inelastic traffic, MW schedulers may not perform well in LTE networks in the presence of TCP traffic, as they are agnostic to the TCP congestion control mechanism. We then design a new scheduler called “Queue MW” (Q-MW) which is tailored specifically to TCP dynamics by giving higher priority to TCP flows whose queue at the base station is very small in order to encourage them to send more data at a faster rate. We have implemented Q-MW in ns-3 and studied its performance in a wide range of network scenarios in terms of queue size at the base station and round-trip delay. Our simulation results show that Q-MW achieves peak and average throughput gains of 37 and 10 compared to MW schedulers if tuned properly.