Radio resource management and packet scheduling in femtocell networks

In wireless networks, resource management is a very challenging task since network resources are always limited, and wireless channel is time varying. Sharing resources among resource users needs to be coordinated, and this coordination is achieved by packet schedulers. This research presents the performance of state-of-the-art macrocell scheduling algorithms in a CDMA 2000 1×EVDO femtocell network. The performance of Round Robin (RR), maximum Data Rate Control (DRC), proportional fairness (PF), exponent DRC (expDRC), average DRC (aveDRC), and maxDRC-PF schedulers are investigated. For performance analysis, paper introduces a unique methodology which combines real femtocell network experiments with computer simulations. Data rate control (DRC) values collected through real experiments are used in computer simulations in order to assess the performance of scheduling methods in femtocell environment. Best effort (BE) and Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic are modeled and simulated in computer simulations. Schedulers´ performance are measured in terms of total delivered throughput, VoIP packet delay, and throughput fairness. In conclusion, expDRC and maxDRC-PF scheduler is recommended since they have the lowest VoIP packet delay bound error, and the high throughput and throughput fairness compared to other scheduling methods.