QoS-Aware Power-Efficient Scheduler for LTE Uplink

The continuous increase of mobile data traffic has created a substantial demand for high data rate transmission over mobile networks. However, mobile devices are provided with small batteries that can be drained quickly by high data rate transmission. Motivated by the fundamental requirement of extending the battery utilization time per charge of mobile devices, this work presents two power-efficient schedulers for mixed streaming services in LTE uplink systems. Our objective is to minimize the total transmission power for all users. The proposed schedulers are subject to rate, delay, contiguous allocation, and maximum transmission power constraints. We first consider an optimal scheduler that uses binary integer programming (BIP). Then, we propose an iterative scheduler that performs a low-complexity greedy algorithm which solves the BIP problem. We compare the performance of the proposed schedulers to the state-of-the-art schedulers such as the energy-aware resource allocation (EARA) [1] and the proportional fair (PF) [2] in terms of rate, delay, average transmission power and complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed schedulers offer a remarkable transmission power reduction as compared to the PF and the EARA schedulers, and satisfy the QoS requirements.