On the performance of advanced QOS-aware packet scheduling for multiantenna packet radio systems

In this paper, we study and analyze the performance of advanced OFDM packet scheduling techniques with given QoS requirements under the 3GPP UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) framework. Stemming from our previous studies in scheduling algorithm developments, we show that the main radio resource management (RRM) performance measures such as fairness, throughput and coverage are efficiently controlled by proper scheduling priority metric calculations utilizing time-, frequency- and spatial domains. The proposed scheduling algorithms are able to meet the higher layer quality of service (QoS) targets, taking into account Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic scenarios with Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) constrains as well as instantaneous user channel conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate that by using such algorithms, significant coverage improvements in the order of 40% can be obtained at the expense of 8% total throughput loss compared to more traditional scheduling approaches. Furthermore, the user fairness is also greatly increased, by more than 15% when measured using Jain´s fairness index.