LTE uplink scheduling in multi-core systems

Abstract: With the goal to achieve higher and higher performance with the next-generation of Long Term Evolution (LTE) equipment, multi-core processors are implemented more and more inside LTE eNodeB. The development and increasing use of multi-core processors system raises a challenge to the current scheduling algorithm. The intuitive way of scheduling is a serial process, by which users are scheduled one after another within one cell. It becomes very inefficient in a multi core system, since the parallelism provided by the multi core platform is not fully utilised. The goal of this study is to investigate how the uplink scheduler algorithm can be parallelised efficiently over several DSPs in a multi-core environment. In this thesis, a three-phase algorithm is presented. For each phase, two solutions are provided and evaluated against each other in terms of throughput, time efficiency and fairness, the result is compared with serial scheduling process. The simulation result indicates that the parallel scheduling algorithm is able to achieve higher time efficiency than serial scheduling algorithm, while keeping the same throughput performance. The time improvement depends on the number of schedulable UEs in the system, processors number, the solution used in each phase and the throughput trade-off.