Traffic Offloading Impact on the Performance of Channel-aware/qos-aware Scheduling Algorithms for Video-applications over Lte-a Hetnets Using Carrier Aggregation

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards as Release 8/9. The LTE supports at max 20 MHz channel bandwidth for a carrier. The number of LTE users and their applications are increasing, which increases the demand on the system BW. A new feature of the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) which is defined in the 3GPP standards as Release 10/11 is called Carrier Aggregation (CA), this feature allows the network to aggregate more carriers in-order to provide a higher bandwidth. Carrier Aggregation has three main cases: Intra-band contiguous, Intra-band non-contiguous, Inter-band contiguous. In addition to the Carrier Aggregation feature, LTE-A supports Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). HetNets consists of a mix of macro-cells, remote radio heads, and low power nodes such as pico-cells, and femto-cells. HetNets allow cellular network operators to support higher data traffic by offloading it to a smaller cells such as femto-cells. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the Quality of Service (QoS) performance of the Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (MLWDF), the Exponential Rule (Exp-Rule), and the Logarithmic Rule (Log-Rule) scheduling algorithms while offloading 50% of the macro-cell's traffic to five femto-cells, 100% of the macro-cell's traffic to five femto-cells, 100% of the macro-cell's traffic to ten femto-cells, and to compare it with the case in-which traffic offloading is not applied. The QoS performance evaluation is based on the system's average throughput, Packet Loss Rate (PLR), average packet delay, and fairness among users. The LTE-Sim-5 with modifications is used in the simulation process. Simulation results show that offloading 100% of the Macro-cell's traffic to five femtocells had the highest maximum throughput, and the best PLR values especially when using the Log-Rule, in-which using it maintained the PLR values around 0.15 despite increasing the number of users. The least average packet delay was achieved when offloading 100% of the Macro-cell's traffic to ten femto-cells, the delay dropped to below 5 ms. The fairness indicators for the three scheduling algorithms while traffic offloading was applied fluctuated in a linear way between a range of values of 0.7 and 0.9.