Time-Frequency Coupled Proportional Fair Scheduler with Multicarrier Awareness for LTE Downlink

Proportional fair schedulers have been thoroughly used in Long Term Evolution (LTE) due to their ability to provide a good trade-off between cell spectral efficiency and user fairness. Current algorithms provide suboptimum solutions at a low computational cost, but present several drawbacks. This paper proposes a Coupled and Multicarrier Aware PFS (CMA-PFS) for LTE downlink that increases efficiency as compared with current algorithms with independent time and frequency domain scheduling, referred to as Decoupled PFS (D-PFS). The proposed algorithm includes new features such as tight coupling between time and frequency domain scheduling and multicarrier transmission awareness. Simulations have been conducted using an International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (IMT-Advanced) compliant semi-static simulator. Results show that the CMA-PFS improves proportional fairness as compared with D-PFS that is reflected both in an increase of cell spectral efficiency (around +2%) and a higher cell-edge user spectral efficiency (around +10%) in a Single User MIMO (SU-MIMO) system.