Multiuser Scheduling on the LTE Downlink with Simulated Annealing

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 in [1], 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 method such as Simulated Annealing (SA), the results in this paper show that significant reduction in complexity can be obtained while achieving near-optimal solutions.