Effective scheduling of real-time traffic in HSUPA

Abstract

Scheduling of real-time uplink flows in HSUPA is hampered by the fact that the NodeB does not know the size and dead-lines of the uplink packets, as the User Equipment (UE) only reports coarse-grained Scheduling Information (SI) advertising the overall backlog. In this paper, we describe how the NodeB can use the sequence of SI to reconstruct a UE queue, using affordable computations. This makes it possible to use scheduling algorithms employing packet sizes and deadlines in HSUPA, with obvious performance benefits. We present a general Virtual Queueing framework, that can be employed with any kind of traffic, and a specialized version of it for periodic (e.g., voice) traffic.