Comparative Study of Packet Scheduling Algorithm in LTE Network

At present, Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is the most popular Internet access technology because of its robust wireless connectivity that can support data, voice, video and messaging traffic. This advantage has significantly increased the number of users availing themselves of these services through various devices. Such an increase in the number of users has also increased network traffic. Thus, scheduling algorithms are needed to prioritize and distribute available resources among users to improve system performance. Researchers have proposed several algorithms that focus on meeting the Quality of Service requirement for different applications. The current study evaluates the performance of four scheduling algorithms for LTE downlink transmission, namely, proportional fair, exponential PF, exponential rule and log-rule algorithms, in a certain scenario. The performance of these algorithms was evaluated using an LTE-Sim simulator. Simulation results show that the log-rule algorithm outperforms other packet scheduling algorithms in terms of delay, throughput and packet loss ratio when serving Voice-over-Internet Protocol packet data service on the LTE network.