2015 International Conference on Computational Intelligence & Networks (CINE 2015) A Comparative Analysis of Packet Scheduling Schemes for Multimedia Services in LTE Networks B. P. S. Sahoo * , Deepak Puthal † , Satyabrata Swain ‡ and Sambit Mishra ‡ * Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan (R. O. C) † Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Silchar, India ‡ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India Email: {biswap.singh, deepak.puthal, satya.swain10, skmishra.nitrkl}@gmail.com Abstract—The revolution in high-speed broadband network is the requirement of the current time, in other words here is an unceasing demand for high data rate and mobility. Both provider and customer see, the long time evolution (LTE) could be the promising technology for providing broadband, mobile Internet access. To provide better quality of service (QoS) to customers, the resources must be utilized at its fullest impeccable way. Resource scheduling is one of the important functions for remanufacturing or upgrading system performance. This paper studies the recently proposed packet scheduling schemes for LTE systems. The study has been concentrated in implication to real-time services such as online video streaming and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). For performance study, the LTE- Sim simulator is used. The primary objective of this paper is to provide results that will help researchers to design more efficient scheduling schemes, aiming to get better overall system performance. For the simulation study, two scenarios, one for video traffic and other for VoIP have been created. Various per- formances metric such as packet loss, fairness, end-to-end (E2E) delay, cell throughput and spectral efficiency has been measured for both the scenarios varying numbers of users. In the light of the simulation result analysis, the frame level scheduler (FLS) algorithms outperform other, by balancing the QoS requirements for multimedia services. Keywords-Long term evolution (LTE), cellular networks, packet scheduling schemes, quality-of-service (QoS), multimedia streaming. I. I NTRODUCTION In the growing complexity of today’s wireless communica- tion systems; the cellular data networks are experiencing an increasing demand for its high data rate and wide mobility. In 2008, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) was introduced by the 3GPP 1 (3rd Generation Partnership Project) in order to increase the capacity and speed of wireless data networks. LTE and WiMAX are the two promising standards in the current cellular technologies. These two are also marketed as 4th Generation (4G) wireless services. LTE offers several important benefits for the subscribers as well as to the service provider. It significantly satisfies the users requirement by targeting the broadband mobile applications with enhanced mobility. With the introduction of Smartphone, the application like HDTV, online gaming, video meetings, etc are certainly become more valuable to the users. Hence, the users under- 1 http://www.3gpp.org stand and appreciate the benefits of LTE high data rates and services. As one of the primary objective of the LTE network is to enhance the data-rate so as to cater the range of highly demanded services; the radio resources or data channels are di- vided and shared efficiently among different active users while considering a satisfied level of QoS to all active users. To shape the requirements, the LTE system uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology in the down- link. The OFDMA technology divides the available bandwidth into multiple narrow-band sub-carriers and allocates a group of sub-carriers to a user based on its requirements, current system load and system configuration [1]. On that ground, collisions can happen more often among the active users while sharing the same data channel. Hence, it needs to take care by the resource allocation scheme. With 3G technologies, simple video services were attempted with attention focused on video telephony and multimedia messaging, and were somewhat successful. However, these technologies are still capacity limited and not able to economically support the huge mobile video demand that is emerging. This directly leads to the desire to use a broadband wireless network, such as LTE, for doing the same stuffs with greater speed and mobility. This can be mostly achievable by efficient resource allocation technique. Hence, the fast packet scheduling is one of the important data-rate improvement techniques among Link Adaptation, Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) Beam forming and Hybrid ARQ in 4G networks [12]. In this paper, we have studied packet scheduling algorithms that are proposed in the past year for LTE cellular networks in implication to multimedia services. A comparison of per- formance indexes such as average system throughput, end-to- delay (E2E), packet-loss-ratio (PLR) and fairness is reported for LTE systems over a realistic simulated scenario in multi- cell environment. The main goal this study is to provide results that will help in the design process of LTE cellular networks, aiming to get better overall performance. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. An overview LTE of packet scheduler design and challenges are presented in Section II. Section III describes the recently proposed packet scheduling algorithms for LTE system. Section IV describes simulation scenario and examines the reported results. Finally, Section V concludes the paper.