A novel MAC scheduling algorithm for TCP throughput improvement in LTE system

LTE standard provides different Quality of Service (QoS) options which enable to provide multiple services to the User Equipment (UE). Design of scheduling algorithm for Transmission Control protocol (TCP) based traffic is challenging in wireless networks. Many papers have been developed to improve the throughput of TCP traffic. In this work, a novel and practically feasible scheduling algorithm is proposed to handle the TCP traffic in order to improve the overall LTE cell and UE throughput. An uplink grant is provided at the time of scheduling Downlink (DL) TCP traffic for acknowledgement transfer which minimizes TCP throughput fluctuations which improves cell and per UE throughput. The amount of advanced uplink grant can be computed using Kalman filter algorithm by considering real time reported parameters as per LTE standard. The proposed algorithm is implemented in small cell platform and real time results are generated. It shows that significant gain is achieved in throughput under specific traffic conditions.