A PDR-Based Scheduling Scheme for LTE-A Networks

—Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology is one of theenhancements keys which supports high bandwidth up to 100MHz in Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) networks.CA technology has been developed by The 3rd GenerationPartnership Project (3GPP) to serve mobile users with high datarate up to 1 Gbps for downlink and 500 Mbps for uplink.However, 3GPP has not defined a firm provision to handlescheduling process so that scheduling becomes an open issue.This paper proposes a novel scheduling algorithm based onPacket Drop Rate (PDR) and cooperative game theorymechanisms. In the first stage, the classes are classified basedon the PDR including both Real-Time and Non Real-Timeclasses. In the second stage, the proposed algorithm forms acoalition between classes, allowing them to share bandwidth.Then, the available resources are distributed as a proportionamong classes to guarantee the minimum requirements for highpriority applications and give a chance to low priorityapplications to be served. The proposed scheme is evaluated interms of throughput, delay, and fairness and compared withProportional Fairness (PF) and Exponential-rule (EXP-rule)algorithms. The proposed scheme outperforms the other twocomparative algorithms in terms of throughput, delay andfairness index.