Uplink Scheduler for SC-FDMA-Based Heterogeneous Traffic Networks With QoS Assurance and Guaranteed Resource Utilization

Assuring quality-of-service (QoS) and guaranteeing effective utilization of resources in a network with heterogeneous traffic is difficult due to the conflicting requirements associated with the different types of traffic. Nevertheless, emerging high-bandwidth third/fourth-generation (3G/4G) technologies, such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced, are expected to meet the demands of new applications by providing high data rates while simultaneously satisfying each of the individual QoS criteria. The relevant standards recommend single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) as the preferred uplink transmission scheme. In this paper, we have formulated the uplink scheduling problem for SC-FDMA-based heterogeneous traffic systems considering both standard specific constraints and individual user QoS requirements. To capture the QoS requirements of different types of traffic, we adopt a utility function that is already used for the downlink operation of code-division multiple-access (CDMA)-based systems. We also consider an opportunity cost function that is based on granular resource utilization to increase the usefulness of our results in practical situations. We have used the dual decomposition method to solve the resulting problem. Given the high computational complexity of the optimal solution, we have also proposed a suboptimal algorithm that is less complex but which offers acceptable performance. In our evaluation of the performance of our proposed uplink scheduling scheme, we assume that the offered traffic is a combination of best effort traffic, traffic with specified delay bounds, and traffic with specified throughput requirements. An extensive set of simulation results demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of our scheme compared with existing solutions employed by LTE, which is a representative SC-FDMA-based system.