Impact of a Two-Layer QoS-Aware Channel-Aware Packet Scheduler on End-to-End Delay and Throughput of LTE

A future need of wireless and mobile technologies is to unify many existing technologies to have ubiquitous data acquisition. Cellular networks play the dominant role due to their large coverage area and greater portability. One of the most promising unifying technologies that is evolving very quickly to reach the 4G specifications is 3GPP’s LTE that has been adopted by many service providers worldwide. LTE has drastic improvements both in its core network (CN) and Radio Access Network in comparison with its predecessors. Adopting this new modulation scheme has led to many achievements on the Radio Access Network side. Moreover, elimination of the Circuit Switch (CS) network from the Core Network side has made LTE a fast all-IP network suitable for many of today’s delay sensitive applications. One of the important functionalities in a radio access network is packet scheduling. On the one hand, Quality of Service (QoS) demands of users are different and should be satisfied. On the other hand, wireless environments have many inherited characteristics such as variable channel conditions, multi-path interference and fading that should be taken into account when designing a packet scheduler. The packet scheduler takes in to account the channel condition experienced by each user to overcome channel variants of wireless contexts. Also, it tries to have a trade-off between computational complexity and fairness to achieve QoS provisions. We have proposed a two-layer channel-aware and QoS-aware packet scheduler. This packet scheduler tries to satisfy QoS needs and improve the efficiency of higher priority applications at the cost of being unfair to lower priority queues. It does this by classifying QCI queues into three groups in the first layer (Inter-group scheduling) and then serving groups based on their priority. IV We use the OPNET Modeler to simulate our PS Scheme and through end-to-end application delay and users’ throughput achievement show that our proposed scheme is more efficient in comparison with the OPNET baseline