QoS-aware Traffic Scheduling in LTE-Advanced Relay-Enhanced Networks

The main challenge when providing quality of services in future mobile networks is the low signal quality regimes, mainly experienced by the users located at the cell edge. The deployment of relay nodes promises significant improvement of the received signal quality and enables the establishment of QoS-aware services for such users. In this work, we propose and study the performance of a novel QoS-aware scheduling algorithm focusing on LTE-Advanced relay-enhanced networks. Using traffic with different QoS requirements for the downlink stream, we demonstrate that the proposed QoS-aware scheduling algorithm efficiently serve traffic with mixed rate and delay requirements. Moreover, it manages to maintain a reasonable service quality for all the users including the relayed users. We finalize this work comparing the performance of the proposed scheme to a reference scheduler.