A resource management scheme for hybrid access femtocells in LTE/LTE-A networks

In Long Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks, hybrid access femtocells have been introduced as a tradeoff between closed and open access femtocells. However, quality of service (QoS) provisioning in hybrid access femtocells has become more challenging due to different user priority and traffic classes. Existing studies do not consider the LTE/LTE-A protocols and QoS priority of different traffic classes. In this work, a resource management scheme for prioritizing closed subscriber group (CSG) members and QoS provisioning in LTE/LTE-A hybrid access femtocells is proposed. Firstly, an admission control problem and a packet scheduling problem, which account for different user priority and QoS of different traffic classes, are formulated. A lexicographic greedy algorithm and a delay-prioritized scheduling algorithm are proposed to solve the two problems respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a substantial performance gain in terms of packet loss and fairness for real-time traffic flows, albeit at the cost of lower fairness for non-real-time traffic flows.