Multiuser scheduling in LTE OFDMA

Introduction
In order to exploit multiuser diversity and to increase flexibility in scheduling, orthogonal
frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is employed, in which multiple users can
simultaneously share the subcarriers. OFDMA is used as air interface for 4G and beyond
wireless networks mainly due to its robustness to frequency selective mutlipath fading, and the
flexibility it provides in radio resource allocation. In LTE systems scheduling plays an important
role as it determines the overall system performance. Scheduling problem is to determine the
allocation of scheduling blocks (SB) to a subset of user equipments in order to maximize some
objective function, i-e, system throughput or other fairness-sensitive metrics.
Due to the scarcity of radio resources, it is of importance for the LTE wireless
communication system to make efficient usage of the available radio resources. To achieve this,
the main task of an OFDMA scheduler is to allocate radio resources intelligently so that higher
system throughput can be obtained. The problem of multiuser downlink scheduling in an LTE
cellular network communication system needed to be more addressed so that radio resource
allocation can be made more efficiently. Resource allocation in LTE system has been addressed
but still a lot of work needed to be done to achieve resource allocation intelligently. In [1] the
authors proposed a optimal multiuser scheduler. The objective in [1] is to formulate the
scheduling problem so as to jointly maximize the sum of the bit rates for all users and provided a
suboptimal solution by simplifying the problem into several parallel single-user optimization
problems. In [2] maximum rate algorithm which does not consider fairness among users was
proposed. Here, a multiuser scheduler with proportional fairness (PF) is proposed. Numerical
results show that the proposed PF scheduler provides a superior fairness performance with a
modest loss in throughput. In [2] a suboptimal PF scheduler is also proposed, which has a much
lower complexity at the cost of some throughput degradation.
The application oriented quality of service (QoS) for video delivery such as delay
constraint and video distortion have been largely ignored. Application QoS constraints such as
video quality and packet playback constraints are very important performance metrics that
should be considered in the LTE OFDMA scheduling for real-time wireless video delivery . In
[3] Weighted Round-Robin (WRR) algorithm is proposed to achieve high system throughput,
guarantee application layer QoS such as delay constraint, and ensure fairness.
 Research Objectives
 Application design metrics for LTE scheduling, especially video delivery over LTE
 Radio resource allocation in multi-users scenario for LTE systems

It is of importance for the LTE wireless communication system to make efficient usage of the
available radio resources. To achieve this, the main task of an OFDMA scheduler is to allocate
radio resources intelligently so that higher system throughput can be obtained.
At the application layer, video distortion is the most direct QoS performance metric from the
perspective of end users. For real-time source coding, video distortion can be caused by
quantization, packet loss, error concealment, and so on. In the literature different OFDMA
scheduling algorithms have been proposed but previously proposed scheduling methods cannot
achieve satisfactory system performance for real time video delivery over LTE cellular networks.
OFDMA scheduling has been studied, the common task is to maximize the data rate under the
total power constraint, while the application design metrics are usually ignored. Furthermore,
there has been little work done on the LTE scheduling issue, especially for video delivery over
LTE. However, application QoS constraints such as video quality and packet playback
constraints are very important performance metrics that should be considered in the LTE
OFDMA scheduling for real-time wireless video delivery. To explain, higher system throughput
does not necessarily mean higher video quality at the receiver’s end. Actually, with the increase
of system throughput, the average packet loss rate will also increase, which could degrade the
overall user-perceived system performance in terms of video quality. PF scheduling algorithm
the system can achieve long-term fairness but cannot guarantee the delay constraint for real-time
video services. Therefore, scheduling methods cannot achieve satisfactory system performance
for real time video delivery over LTE cellular network s.

References
[1] R wan, et al., “Multiuser Scheduling on the Downlink of an LTE Cellular System” Journal of
Research Letters in Communication, 2008.
[2] R Kwan, et al., “Proportional Fair Multiuser Scheduling in LTE,” in IEEE, Signal Processing
Letters, June 2009, Volume 16, page(s): 461 – 464.
[3] Haiyan Luo et al., “Quality-driven cross-layer optimized video delivery over LTE” IEEE
Communication Magazine Feb. 2010, Volume 48, page(s) 102-109.
[4] Raymond Kwan & Cyril Leung, “A Survey of Scheduling and Interference Mitigation in
LTE,” Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2010.