A field-tested QoS scheduler for diverse traffic flows over mobile networks

LTE and WiMAX are the most important radio access technologies in the fourth generation mobile networks providing broadband access. The technologies bring strong QoS support, especially for multimedia services such as real-time video streaming, requiring bounded packet loss rate and delay. To reach these goals, effective packet scheduling schemes are needed to allocate radio resources. The function is fundamental and very challenging, particularly when considering system level performance and QoS requirements from users. In this paper, we present a low-complexity field-tested QoS downlink scheduler. Besides proportional fairness, the novel mechanism performs unified resource evaluation across traffic flows honoring individual QoS parameters. A resource multiplier is designed to preserve a relative weighting ratio for real-time traffic and prevent low priority flows from starvation. The waste of resources due to block-based allocation is also eliminated. The testing in both lab and field environments shows satisfactory overall throughput gain and most importantly the effective weighted distribution of resources across diverse traffic flows.