Abstract—Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology is one of the enhancements keys which supports high bandwidth up to 100 MHz in Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) networks. CA technology has been developed by The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to serve mobile users with high data rate up to 1 Gbps for downlink and 500 Mbps for uplink. However, 3GPP has not defined a firm provision to handle scheduling process so that scheduling becomes an open issue. This paper proposes a novel scheduling algorithm based on Packet Drop Rate (PDR) and cooperative game theory mechanisms. In the first stage, the classes are classified based on the PDR including both Real-Time and Non Real-Time classes. In the second stage, the proposed algorithm forms a coalition between classes, allowing them to share bandwidth. Then, the available resources are distributed as a proportion among classes to guarantee the minimum requirements for high priority applications and give a chance to low priority applications to be served. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of throughput, delay, and fairness and compared with Proportional Fairness (PF) and Exponential-rule (EXP-rule) algorithms. The proposed scheme outperforms the other two comparative algorithms in terms of throughput, delay and fairness index.

Index Terms—Scheduling, resource allocation, LTE-A, 4G, QoS, RT applications

Cite: Ayman Hajjawi, Mahamod Ismail, Nor Fadzilah Abdullah, Rosdiadee Nordin, and Özgür Ertuğ, “A PDR-Based Scheduling Scheme for LTE-A Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 856-861, 2016. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.11.9.856-861