Performance of proportional fair frequency and time domain scheduling in LTE uplink

Channel-aware scheduling is one of the advanced features introduced in the uplink of Long Term Evolution (LTE) in order to improve the system spectral efficiency. In the uplink of LTE channel-aware scheduling is possible thanks to the transmission of sounding reference signals. In this paper the performance of frequency and time domain scheduling in LTE uplink is investigated. In particular, we focus on the performance impact of various scheduling metrics which try to achieve proportional fairness in throughput or resource allocation. Our analysis shows that a combination of a throughput-based metric in the time domain and an SINR-based metric in the frequency domain is able to provide the highest performance. For example, in a noise-limited propagation environment with high inter-site distance the sector throughput gain compared to performing throughput-based proportional fair scheduling in both time and frequency domain is above 20%.