Analysis of power efficiency of schedulers in LTE

In this work we analyse the behaviour of six different LTE scheduling algorithms, namely the round robin, best CQI, proportional fair, Max-Min, resource fair and the iterative hungarian schedulers. A downlink LTE network is simulated and the properties of the schedulers are analysed for a varying number of served users. These schedulers are studied from a throughput and fairness perspective through system level simulations. Furthermore the impact of each scheduler on the energy consumption is also computed with the aid of a flexible base station power model. The simulations show that the best CQI scheduler proves to deliver the highest data rate but lowest fairness while the Max-Min achieves exactly the opposite. The round robin delivers the worst overall performances while the other ones behave similarly in between. This work argues for the introduction of an energy consumption figure of merit for a fair and insightful comparison between specific scheduling algorithms.