TCP-aware scheduling in LTE networks

Designing scheduling algorithms that work in synergy with TCP is a challenging problem in wireless networks. Extensive research on scheduling algorithms has focused on inelastic traffic, where there is no correlation between traffic dynamics and scheduling decisions. In this work, we study the performance of several scheduling algorithms in LTE networks, where the scheduling decisions are intertwined with wireless channel fluctuations to improve the system throughput. We use ns-3 simulations to study the performance of several scheduling algorithms with a specific focus on Max Weight (MW) schedulers with both UDP and TCP traffic, while considering the detailed behavior of OFDMA-based resource allocation in LTE networks. We show that, contrary to its performance with inelastic traffic, MW schedulers may not perform well in LTE networks in the presence of TCP traffic, as they are agnostic to the TCP congestion control mechanism. We then design a new scheduler called “Queue MW” (Q-MW) which is tailored specifically to TCP dynamics by giving higher priority to TCP flows whose queue at the base station is very small in order to encourage them to send more data at a faster rate. We have implemented Q-MW in ns-3 and studied its performance in a wide range of network scenarios in terms of queue size at the base station and round-trip delay. Our simulation results show that Q-MW achieves peak and average throughput gains of 37% and 10% compared to MW schedulers if tuned properly.