Performance analysis of buffer aware scheduling for video services in LTE network

Recent advancements in broadband wireless communication technologies enable mobile users to receive video streaming services with various smart devices. The long term evolution (LTE) network provides high bandwidth and low latency for several emerging mobile applications. This paper proposes the buffer aware scheduling (BAS) approach to schedule the downlink video traffic in LTE network. The proposed BAS scheme applies the weighting function to heuristically adjust the scheduling priority by considering the buffer status and channel condition of UE so as to reduce the time that UE stays in the connected state without receiving data. Both of 1080P and 2160P resolution video streaming sources were applied for exhaustive simulations to examine the performance of the proposed scheme by comparing to that of the fair bandwidth (FB) and the best channel quality indicator (CQI) schemes. The simulation results indicate that the proposed BAS scheme not only achieves better performance in power saving, streaming delivery time, and throughput than the FB scheme while maintaining the similar performance as the best CQI scheme in light traffic load. Specifically, the proposed scheme reduces streaming delivery time and generates less signaling overhead than the best CQI scheme when the traffic load is heavy.