Quality-driven multi-user resource allocation and scheduling over LTE for delay sensitive multimedia applications

The expectation from a future generation cellular network is to provide multiplay applications of VoIP, video and data to a continuously growing number of cellular users. The scarcity of the available radio spectrum coupled with the unique traffic handling and Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements of the converged services poses a huge challenge to the network operators. The solution of over-provisioning the network by increasing the amount of bandwidth is not economical. Therefore, efficient partition of network resources becomes mandatory. Scheduling plays an important in determining the overall efficiency of a wireless system. This thesis focuses on quality driven scheduling for efficient resource allocation in multi-user downlink LTE systems. Video traffic contributes a major proportion of network traffic. Therefore, one of the main goals of this work is to design scheduling strategies which consider information about video traffic with the aim of improving the service quality perceived by the user. Various scheduling strategies are proposed taking into account different criteria such as packet delay and importance of a video packet. This thesis presents a novel cross-layer resource allocation architecture which reduces the need for cross-layer signaling and frequent end-to-end link probing (for video rate adaptation) required by other cross-layer approaches. Apart from the novel cross-layer architecture, the thesis applies the concepts of game theory and fuzzy logic frameworks in radio resource management and proposes a composite scheduling rule which considers the service needs of different traffic types such as video, VoIP and data. Results show that the proposed scheduling schemes lead to an efficient partition of radio resources while achieving a significant improvement in the perceived quality as compared to state-of-the-art scheduling rules.