Joint Scheduling for Multi-Service in Coordinated Multi-Point OFDMA Networks

In this paper, the issues upon user scheduling in the downlink packet transmission for multiple services are addressed for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) OFDMA networks. We consider mixed traffic with voice over IP (VOIP) and best effort (BE) services. In order to improve cell-edge performance and guarantee diverse quality of service (QoS), a utility-based joint scheduling algorithm is proposed, which consists of two steps: ant colony optimization (ACO) based joint user selection and greedy subchannel assignment. We compare the proposed algorithm with the optimal algorithm and the greedy user selection (GUS) based scheme. Via simulation results, we show that the performance of our proposed algorithm well approaches to that of the optimal solution. It is also observed that 95% of BE users are satisfied with average cell-edge data rate greater than 200kbps by using either of the two algorithms. Whereas, our proposed algorithm ensures that more than 95% of VoIP users are satisfied with packet drop ratio less than 2%, compared to 78% by the GUS based algorithm.