Comparative Performance Study of LTE Downlink Schedulers

Long time evolution (LTE) represents an emerging and promising technology for providing broadband, mobile Internet access. Because of the limitation of available spectrum resource, high spectrum efficiency technologies such as channel-aware scheduling need to be explored. In this work, we evaluate the performance of three scheduling algorithms proposed for LTE downlink transmission. The evaluation takes place in mixed traffic scenarios and aims at exploring strengths and weaknesses of the proposed algorithms. Simulation results illustrate the importance of real-time traffic awareness by schedulers when a specified level of quality of service is required. The research shows that lack of prioritisation of multimedia traffic will lead to severe degradation of video and VoIP services even with a relatively low network load.