Towards an Application-Aware Resource Scheduling With Carrier Aggregation in Cellular Systems

In this letter, we introduce an application-aware approach for resource block scheduling with carrier aggregation in long-term-evolution advanced (LTE-advanced) cellular networks. In our approach, users are partitioned in different groups based on the carriers coverage area. In each group of users, users equipments (UE)s are assigned resource blocks (RB)s from all in band carriers. We use a utility proportional fairness (PF) approach in the utility percentage of the application running on the UE. Each user is guaranteed a minimum quality of service (QoS) with a priority criterion that is based on the type of application running on the UE. We prove that our scheduling policy exists, and therefore, the optimal solution is tractable. Simulation results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed RB scheduling approach with other scheduling policies.