Downlink scheduling in a cellular network for quality-of-service assurance

We consider the problem of scheduling data in the downlink of a cellular network over parallel time-varying channels, while providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to multiple users in the network. We design simple and efficient admission control, resource allocation, and scheduling algorithms for guaranteeing requested QoS. In our design, a joint Knopp and Humblet (K&H)/round robin (RR) scheduler, composed of K&H scheduling and RR scheduling, utilizes both multiuser and frequency diversity to achieve capacity gain when delay constraints are loose or moderate. However, for tight delay constraints, an additional reference channel scheduler is required to obtain additional frequency diversity gain. The key advantage of our formulation is that the desired QoS constraints can be explicitly enforced by utilizing the concept of effective capacity.