Abstract. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular technology is expected to extend the capacity and improve the performance of current 3G cellular networks. Among the key mechanisms in LTE responsible for traffic management is the packet scheduler, which handles the allocation of resources to active flows in both the frequency and time dimension. This paper investigates for various scheduling scheme how they affect the inter-cell interference characteristics and how the interference in turn affects the user's performance. A special focus in the analysis is on the impact of flow-level dynamics resulting from the random user behaviour. For this we use a hybrid analytical/simulation approach which enables fast evaluation of flow-level performance measures. Most interestingly, our findings show that the scheduling policy significantly affects the inter-cell interference pattern but that the scheduler specific pattern has little impact on the flow-level performance.
IntroductionA key feature of packet scheduling in LTE networks is the possibility to schedule not only in time (as in UMTS/EUL) but also in frequency. The latter is enabled by the orthogonality between sub-carriers in SC-FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) -the radio access technology chosen in LTE uplink. The smallest scheduling unit is termed a resource block (RB), see [6], and is the intersection between the frequency and time domain scheduling units. Due to the organisation of the spectrum into resource blocks and the various allocation approaches of these over the users, each resource block may experience different inter-cell interference. Hence, we can observe multiple inter-cell interference processes each of which behaves as a stochastic process.Inter-cell interference for LTE networks has been widely researched. Interestingly most studies concentrate on performance evaluation of packet scheduling mechanisms with interference mitigation either based on inter-cell interference Corresponding author current affiliation: dimitrova@iam.unibe.ch, Neubruckstrasse 10, CH 3012 Bern, Switserland.