Performance Evaluation of Downlink Packet Scheduling Algorithms in LTE

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the next generation wireless communication network with fast connectivity and high mobility to support variety of applications like video conferencing, video streaming, file transfer, web browsing etc. LTE system effectively utilizes the resources by dynamically scheduling the users in both frequency and time domain. However, scheduling algorithms are not defined in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards. Therefore, different scheduling strategies are proposed in the literature. This paper evaluates the performance of different proposed scheduling algorithms such as proportional fairness, modified largest weighted delay first, exponential rule and logarithmic rule in downlink direction. The performance evaluation is conducted in terms of average goodput, fairness index and Packet Loss Ratio (PLR). It is shown that exponential rule outperforms well compared to other algorithms in terms of average goodput and packet loss ratio and with a satisfactory level of fairness index.