Multiple traffic scheduling for enhanced General Packet Radio Service

State-of-the-art cellular networks such as General Packet Radio Service systems (GPRS) with enhanced data rates for global evolution (EDGE) air interfaces can support a wide variety of applications, e.g., Web browsing and video conferencing. The desired quality of communication channels, however, for such wireless networks depends on the interference contributed by location errors and elapsed signal strength. To accommodate different quality-of-service (QoS) classes for such widely received applications, an efficient scheduling for air interfaces must essentially be supported. We propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm by together taking the interference and varying QoS requirements into consideration for GPRS with EDGE air interfaces. Conceptually, the proposed scheme assigns priority in order to the conversational, streaming, interactive and background traffic classes defined by ETSI. Each channel is equipped with an A-buffer to gather the acknowledge messages of the successfully transmitted packets to measure the utilization of the associated channel. A global monitoring device tracks each mobile station's state. Based on the measured channel utilization and the states of mobile stations, the proposed scheduling dynamically assigns channels to the ongoing traffic. From the event-driven simulations, the scheme can significantly outperform the scheme without any support of dynamic channel assignment, especially for the interactive and background traffic classes.