Improving Throughput and Fairness on the Downlink Shared Channel in UMTS WCDMA Networks

A resource scheduling scheme is presented to improve throughput and fairness for NRT packet data traffic on the downlink shared channel of a UMTS WCDMA network supporting multiple services. The proposed Fair Resource Scheduling (FRS) scheme takes into account link conditions to enhance throughput and provides fair resource sharing among traffic flows. FRS includes service priority handling during admission and scheduling to provide service class differentiation. The scheduling disciplines presented in this paper aim at improving throughput and delay performance of packet users while ensuring fair service to all admitted users. The analysis indicates that a fair resource scheduling policy provides the required throughput and delay performance for packet data over the WCDMA downlink.