MECC scheduling algorithm in vehicular environment for uplink transmission in LTE networks

Abstract

Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is chosen because of the lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) value in uplink transmission. However, the contiguity constraint is one of the major constraint presents in uplink packet scheduling, where all RBs allocated to a single UE must be contiguous in the frequency-domain within each time slot to maintain its single carrier. This paper proposed an uplink-scheduling algorithm namely the Maximum Expansion with Contiguity Constraints (MECC) algorithm, which supports both the RT and NRT services. The MECC algorithm is deployed in two stages. In the first stage, the RBs are allocated fairly among the UEs. The second stage allocates the RBs with the highest metric value and expands the allocation on both sides of the matrix, M with respect to the contiguity constraint. The performance of the MECC algorithm was observed in terms of throughput, fairness, delay, and Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) for VoIP, video and best effort flows. The MECC scheduling algorithm is compared to other algorithms namely the Round Robin (RR), Channel-Dependent First Maximum Expansion (CD-FME), and Proportional Fairness First Maximum Expansion (PF-FME). From here, it can be concluded that the MECC algorithm shows the best results among other algorithms by delivering the highest throughput which is up to 81.29% and 90.04% than CD-FME and RR scheduler for RT and NRT traffic respectively, having low PLR and delay which is up to 93.92% and 56.22% of improvement than CD-FME for the RT traffic flow. The MECC also has a satisfactory level of fairness for the cell-edge users in a vehicular environment of LTE network.