Quality of Service and Energy Efficient Aware (QEEA) Scheduling Algorithm for Long Term Evolution (LTE)

Abstract

The growing demands for wireless communication services pose new challenges in the coming generation of cellular networks design. In Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, ever-higher data rate and energy efficiency (EE) are required to meet the increasing demands in cellular traffic. High data rates can be achieved, however, it requires high level of energy consumption which needs to be controlled especially in this era of green communication trends. Hence, efficient solutions are necessary to optimize EE and at the same time achieve high data rates to meet green LTE requirements. This paper proposed an efficient algorithm, namely, the Quality of Service (QoS) and Energy Efficient Aware (QEEA) to improve EE and also maximize the throughput by using minimum power of 43 dBm (20 W) which is the lowest power setting according to the 3GPP LTE specifications. The QEAA algorithm is compared against other scheduling algorithms, namely, the Channel and QoS Aware (CQA), Priority Set Scheduler (PSS), Proportional Fair (PF), Maximum Throughput (MT) and Blind Average Throughput (BAT). The simulation process has been done using Network Simulator-3 (NS-3) and the performance of these packet scheduling algorithms were evaluated based on the performance metrics of throughput, delay, packet loss ratio (PLR), energy consumption rate (ECR), and EE for the voice over IP (VoIP), video and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) applications. The results showed that the QEAA algorithm outperformed the other algorithms as it could achieve up to 240% of maximum throughput, 61% reduction in ECR and 150% improvement in EE in terms of number of users in the cell. Thus, it can be concluded that QEAA algorithm is the most energy efficient and the best candidate for provisioning the QoS for the real time (RT) and non-real time (NRT) applications.