Urgency-Based Fair Scheduling for LTE to Improve Packet Loss and Fairness: Design and Evaluation

Classic scheduling algorithms for the LTE uplink in the literature may cause severe packet loss, poor fairness, and inefficient resource allocation. To alleviate packet loss, delay budget rather than channel condition plays a key factor in our proposed algorithm that allows the user equipment (UE) with the least left delay budget to be scheduled first. Besides, the UEs with fewer allocated resources can be served earlier to improve fairness. For reaching efficient resource utilization, our proposed algorithm further poses a constraint in sequential resource allocation. Via extensive simulations, we successfully demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the closely related algorithms in terms of packet loss ratio and fairness index at the cost of raised end-to-end delay but still within the delay bound. For our proposed algorithm, it also gains improvement in throughput due to its reduction in the packet loss ratio and bounded relaxation in the end-to-end delay.