A QoS-aware reconfigurable LTE MAC scheduler

The widespread usage of smartphones reveal the necessity of higher data rates in mobile communication networks. LTE, one of the 4th generation cellular technologies, has been developed to meet high capacity needs. LTE enables the digital convergence via carrying audio, video and data traffic over IP packets. In this paper, a novel LTE downlink scheduling algorithm is designed to support Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of real-time users such as VoIP and video streaming. OMNeT++ based simulations illustrate that the proposed scheduling algorithm improves end to end delay and througput values of real-time UDP and nonreal-time TCP flows compared to the existing MaxCQI scheduler. The tradeoff between the amount of improvement in the end-to-end delay of real-time traffic and the amount of degradation in the throughput of non-real time traffic can be arranged by tuning a parameter of the proposed scheduling algorithm.