Efficient Delay-Based Schedulig Scheme for Supporting Real-Time Traffic in HSDPA Networks

HSDPA is a 3.5G wireless cellular system that can offer data rates of up to 14.4 Mbps which is much beyond what 2.5G and 3G cellular systems could offer. Due to its high supportable data rate, HSDPA can support a wide range of applications with diverse QoS. Data generated by these applications consists of different traffic classes; including conversational, streaming, interactive and background; each having certain QoS requirements. HSDPA scheduling schemes need to accommodate these traffic classes as well as provide certain QoS provisions for them. This paper proposes a delay-based scheduler (DBS) that prioritizes traffic based on its delay requirements. In addition, the DBS is designed to achieve a high throughput and a fair allocation of resources among users. Simulation results indicate that the DBS achieves a lower average queuing delay while maintaining other performance metrics when compared with existing HSDPA scheduling schemes.