Scheduling strategies for LTE uplink with flow behaviour analysis

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a cellular technology developed to support\ud diversity of data traffic at potentially high rates. It is foreseen to extend the capacity and improve the performance of current 3G cellular networks. A key\ud mechanism in the LTE traffic handling is the packet scheduler, which is in charge of allocating resources to active flows in both the frequency and time dimension. In this paper we present a performance comparison of two distinct scheduling schemes for LTE uplink (fair fixed assignment and fair work-conserving) taking into account both packet level characteristics and flow level dynamics due to the random user behaviour. For that purpose, we apply a combined analytical/simulation approach which enables fast evaluation of performance measures such as mean flow transfer times manifesting the impact of resource allocation strategies. The results show that the resource allocation strategy has a crucial impact on performance and that some trends are observed only if flow level dynamics are considered

Measurement-Adaptive Cellular Random Access Protocols

This work considers a single-cell random access channel (RACH) in cellular wireless networks. Communications over RACH take place when users try to connect to a base station during a handover or when establishing a new connection. Within the framework of Self-Organizing Networks (SONs), the system should self- adapt to dynamically changing environments (channel fading, mobility, etc.) without human intervention. For the performance improvement of the RACH procedure, we aim here at maximizing throughput or alternatively minimizing the user dropping rate. In the context of SON, we propose protocols which exploit information from measurements and user reports in order to estimate current values of the system unknowns and broadcast global action-related values to all users. The protocols suggest an optimal pair of user actions (transmission power and back-off probability) found by minimizing the drift of a certain function. Numerical results illustrate considerable benefits of the dropping rate, at a very low or even zero cost in power expenditure and delay, as well as the fast adaptability of the protocols to environment changes. Although the proposed protocol is designed to minimize primarily the amount of discarded users per cell, our framework allows for other variations (power or delay minimization) as well.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables. Springer Wireless Networks 201

Energy and bursty packet loss tradeoff over fading channels: a system-level model

Energy efficiency and quality of service (QoS) guarantees are the key design goals for the 5G wireless communication systems. In this context, we discuss a multiuser scheduling scheme over fading channels for loss tolerant applications. The loss tolerance of the application is characterized in terms of different parameters that contribute to quality of experience (QoE) for the application. The mobile users are scheduled opportunistically such that a minimum QoS is guaranteed. We propose an opportunistic scheduling scheme and address the cross-layer design framework when channel state information (CSI) is not perfectly available at the transmitter and the receiver. We characterize the system energy as a function of different QoS and channel state estimation error parameters. The optimization problem is formulated using Markov chain framework and solved using stochastic optimization techniques. The results demonstrate that the parameters characterizing the packet loss are tightly coupled and relaxation of one parameter does not benefit the system much if the other constraints are tight. We evaluate the energy-performance tradeoff numerically and show the effect of channel uncertainty on the packet scheduler design

Analysis methodology for flow-level evaluation of a hybrid mobile-sensor network

Our society uses a large diversity of co-existing wired and wireless networks in order to satisfy its communication needs. A cooper- ation between these networks can benefit performance, service availabil- ity and deployment ease, and leads to the emergence of hybrid networks. This position paper focuses on a hybrid mobile-sensor network identify- ing potential advantages and challenges of its use and defining feasible applications. The main value of the paper, however, is in the proposed analysis approach to evaluate the performance at the mobile network side given the mixed mobile-sensor traffic. The approach combines packet- level analysis with modelling of flow-level behaviour and can be applied for the study of various application scenarios. In this paper we consider two applications with distinct traffic models namely multimedia traffic and best-effort traffic

Analysis of packet scheduling for UMTS EUL - design decisions and performance evaluation

The UMTS Enhanced Uplink (EUL) provides higher capacity, increased data rates and smaller latency on the communication link from users towards the network. In this paper we present a performance comparison of three distinct EUL scheduling schemes (one-by-one, partial parallel and full parallel) taking into account both the packet level characteristics and the flow level dynamics due to the (random) user behaviour.\ud Using a very efficient hybrid analytical and simulation approach we analyse the three schemes with respect to performance measures such as mean file transfer time and fairness. In UMTS, a significant part of the system capacity will be used to support non-elastic voice traffic. Hence, part of our investigation is dedicated to the effects that the volume of voice traffic has on the performance of the elastic traffic supported by the EUL. Finally, we evaluate the impact that implementation specifics of a full parallel scheduler has on these measures.\ud \ud Our main conclusion is that our partial parallel scheduler, which is a hybrid between the one-by-one and full parallel, outperforms the other two schedulers in terms of mean flow transfer time, and is less sensitive to volume and nature of voice traffic. However, under certain circumstances, the partial parallel scheduler exhibits a somewhat lower fairness than the alternatives