Scheduling and Resource Allocation in LTE Uplink with a Delay Requirement

In this paper, we investigate the problem of schedulingand resource allocation for LTE Single Cell Uplink systemswhich use Single Carrier Frequency Division MultipleAccess (SC-FDMA). SC-FDMA (L-FDMA scheme) has particularscheduling requirements such as limited power consumption and contiguous resource block constraints. This last requirement has been seldom taken into account in the previous scheduling and resource allocation algorithms. In addition, there is also an end-to-end delay requirement concern, which has not yet been investigated in conjunction with block contiguity constraints, in the LTE Uplink scheduling and resource allocation literature.The end-to-end delay is a significant quality of service (QoS) matter; taking into account that it has a notable impact on the number of users that can be effectively served.We provide two new scheduling algorithms that, in additionto the channel contiguity constraint, take also into account the end-to-end delay constraint. Simulations are conducted on traffic instances with up to 144 users and results are compared with two very recently proposed algorithms. Results show that we increase by approximately a factor of 3, the user capacity of the system relative to systems that does not include the end-to-end delay constraint, without sacrificing the user fairness.