Referential bounds analysis of uplink radio resource scheduling in LTE network

Energy efficiency in wireless broadband network is increasingly crucial because of the shrinking size and the battery constraint of mobile devices. Therefore, to save the power of user equipment (UE) is an important issue in practical network applications. Meanwhile, under the condition of limited spectrum and heavy traffic load in system, spectrum efficiency is also important resulting from the pursuits of high quality of service (QoS) and high data rate. In this paper, we propose and compare two extreme radio resource allocation schemes: the power-saving (PS) oriented scheme and the spectrum-saving (SS) oriented scheme in LTE uplink system. The PS oriented scheme minimizes the power consumption in allocating radio resource. On the contrary, the SS oriented scheme considers the efficient radio resource utilization to maximize the system throughput. Although the scheduling purposes are different, both schemes consider the changeable channel condition, QoS satisfaction, and continuous resource blocks (RB) for uplink scheduling in LTE network. Simulation results of system throughput, power consumption, and transmission quality (e.g. packet dropping rate) are compared and analyzed. As these two schemes are designed in minimizing the power consumption and maximizing the spectrum utilization, respectively, the experimental results can be applied as the referential bounds for the study of adaptive scheduling schemes.