Fair resource allocation with QoS support for the uplink of LTE systems

Resource allocators that maximize ergodic sum-rate under proportional rate constraints have been recently introduced and analysed for both OFDMA and SC-FDMA wireless systems. They are able to provide long-term fairness by assigning to users, on average, a predefined share of the available system capacity. However, the short-term fairness of these schedulers with its effect on the delays, and their efficiency in presence of bursty traffic may be open issues for a possible application in 4G wireless networks. In this paper we address these issues by proposing some solutions that make such resource allocators able to support both GBR and best effort traffic. We consider the uplink of a LTE single cell scenario with some realistic conditions (e.g., discrete rate assignment, power control) and evaluate the performance of the proposed solutions in presence of heterogeneous traffic by using QoS-aware proportional fairness based schedulers as benchmark. The results show that the proposed resource allocator is able to achieve an high number of satisfied GBR users with a significant reduction of the packet delay without starving non-GBR users.