Abstract
This paper presents the capacity analysis of a threshold-based SNR scheduler in the long-term evolution (LTE) cellular systems. LTE standard has adopted multiuser OFDMA, and stipulates adjacent subcarrier groupings for mapping the physical OFDM subcarriers into resource blocks that form the basic unit of radio resource management (RRM) in LTE network. The standard however did not specify the details of the RRM algorithm to be employed, leaving this aspect for vendors to differentiate their products. Popular RRM algorithms such as round-robin (RR), proportional fairness (PF), and maximum SNR (MaxSNR), have been implemented recently as operator-selectable options on LTE base station (BS). In this paper, we present a threshold-based SNR scheduler that has the capability of modeling all of the above-mentioned algorithms and thus allows vendors to combine the separate implementations of these algorithms into one generalized scheduling algorithm, where the threshold level used at any time instant defines the scheduling discipline to be realized. We derive the capacity enhancement achievable using the proposed scheduling scheme, and also present system-level simulations to corroborate the analysis. Our analytical and simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm models the existing ones closely at different values of the threshold. The results also demonstrate the data rate enhancements, and the level of user fairness, achievable in the network for various levels of the threshold.