Joint Best Price-CQI Product Scheduling and Congestion Control for LTE

In hybrid wired-wireless media, congestion control and scheduling are both trying to allocate bandwidth to the flows. Performance studies of long-term evolution (LTE) networks show that by decreasing the mismatch between scheduling at the base station of an LTE network and congestion control algorithms implemented at end users, significant improvements in the obtained overall throughput and fairness for best-effort traffic are achieved. In this paper, a problem formulation for joint scheduling and congestion control based on dual problem optimization is provided for a hybrid media, which includes a wireless LTE network. The original optimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems: congestion control problem and link scheduling problem. We propose methods to solve and implement these subproblems in different layers of a hybrid network, and call the derived link scheduling subproblem best price-channel quality indicator (CQI) product scheduling. Then, the performance of the proposed joint algorithm for LTE is studied. The results show a better tradeoff between the overall throughput and the fairness for the joint algorithm compared with classic cases in which congestion control and scheduling are separately designed and implemented without any cooperation. The behavior of the proposed best price-CQI product scheduler and a common proportional fair scheduler is compared, and some notable similarities in the case of applying logarithmic utility functions are observed.