An Optimal Application-Aware Resource Block Scheduling in LTE

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce an approach for application-aware resource block scheduling of elastic and inelastic adaptive real-time traffic in fourth generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The users are assigned to resource blocks. A transmission may use multiple resource blocks scheduled over frequency and time. In our model, we use logarithmic and sigmoidal-like utility functions to represent the users applications running on different user equipments (UE)s. We present an optimal problem with utility proportional fairness policy, where the fairness among users is in utility percentage (i.e user satisfaction with the service) of the corresponding applications. Our objective is to allocate the resources to the users with priority given to the adaptive real-time application users. In addition, a minimum resource allocation for users with elastic and inelastic traffic should be guaranteed. Every user subscribing for the mobile service should have a minimum quality-of-service (QoS) with a priority criterion. We prove that our scheduling policy exists and achieves the maximum. Therefore the optimal solution is tractable. We present a centralized scheduling algorithm to allocate evolved NodeB (eNodeB) resources optimally with a priority criterion. Finally, we present simulation results for the performance of our scheduling algorithm and compare our results with conventional proportional fairness approaches. The results show that the user satisfaction is higher with our proposed method.