Multiuser scheduling on the LTE downlink with meta-heuristic approaches

In this paper, the issue of multi-user radio resource scheduling on the downlink of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular communication system is addressed. An optimization model has been proposed earlier, where radio resources for multiple users are jointly allocated at the air-interface. It has been shown that an optimal solution to such a problem may provide reasonable gain over a simply greedy approach. However, the complexity of such an optimal approach could be prohibitively high. By exploiting meta-heuristic methods such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA), the results in this paper show that significant reduction in complexity can be obtained while achieving nearoptimal solutions. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.