Long Term Evolution Downlink Packet Scheduling Using a Novel Proportional-Fair-Energy Policy

Inter-cell interference (ICI) is a key limiting factor to the general performance of a multi-cell multi-user radio access network. The channel quality of cell edge users is greatly impaired by ICI owing to the fact that cell edge users are furthest away from the their serving base station and closest to the interfering base stations. As a result the Quality of Service (QoS) and energy efficiency of the E-UTRAN is primarily dependant on the cell edge users. Firstly, we propose a new Time Domain Packet Scheduling criterion that endeavours to reduce the variation in the energy performance, of the users, in a temporal sense. The proposed criteria aims to strike a balance between two user prioritisation criteria that result in energy performance at the two extremes of the energy consumption range. The paper shows that this improves the mean energy efficiency of the E-UTRAN. Secondly, we introduce an energy optimisation algorithm to complement the Time Domain Packet Scheduler. The new energy aware packet scheduling criteria is compared against the established throughput based proportional fair scheduler with uniform power allocation and is shown to produce 20% Energy Reduction Gains (ERG) without compromising the spectral efficiency and QoS performance.