Delay Estimation and Fast Iterative Scheduling Policies for LTE Uplink

Abstract—We design fast iterative policies for resource alloca-tion in the uplink of LTE. We generalize recent works on iterative delay and queue based scheduling policies to more general system settings. We model all constraints due to contiguous bandwidth allocation, peak transmit power and fractional power control. We design a novel mechanism for inferring the packet delays approximately from the buffer status reports (BSR) and construct a new non-differentiable objective function which enables delay based scheduling. For frequency flat fading, we construct an O(N logL) optimal resource allocation algorithm for N users and L points of non-differentiability in the objective function. For a frequency diversity scheduler with M sub-bands, the corresponding complexity is essentially O(N(M2+L2)). Through detailed system simulations (based on NGMN and 3GPP evalu-ation methodology) which model H-ARQ, finite resource grants per sub-frame, realistic traffic, power limitations, interference, and channel fading, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our schemes for LTE. I