Towards an Application-Aware Resource Scheduling with Carrier Aggregation in Cellular Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes an application-aware resource scheduling method with carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced networks, aiming to improve QoS guarantees and fairness by grouping users and allocating resources based on application utility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application-aware scheduling approach that considers user groups, utility proportional fairness, and QoS priorities, with proven existence of optimal solutions.

Findings

The proposed scheduling policy guarantees minimum QoS for users.

Simulation results show improved fairness and efficiency over existing policies.

The approach effectively manages resources in carrier-aggregated LTE networks.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an application-aware approach for resource block scheduling with carrier aggregation in Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) cellular networks. In our approach, users are partitioned in different groups based on the carriers coverage area. In each group of users, users equipments (UE)s are assigned resource blocks (RB)s from all in band carriers. We use a utility proportional fairness (PF) approach in the utility percentage of the application running on the UE. Each user is guaranteed a minimum quality of service (QoS) with a priority criterion that is based on the type of application running on the UE. We prove that our scheduling policy exists and therefore the optimal solution is tractable. Simulation results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed RB scheduling approach with other scheduling policies.