Efficient allocation of LTE downlink spectral resource to improve fairness and throughput

Summary For the current generation of cellular communication systems, long‐term evolution (LTE) has been the major protocol to support high‐speed data transmission. It is critical to allocate downlink spectral resource in LTE, namely, resource blocks (RBs), but the issue is not well addressed in the standard. Therefore, the paper develops an efficient RB allocation algorithm with 4 mechanisms to improve both fairness and throughput in LTE. For fairness concern, our RB allocation algorithm uses a resource‐reservation mechanism to prevent cell‐edge user equipments from starvation, and a credit‐driven mechanism to keep track of the amount of resource given to each user equipment. For throughput concern, it adopts both weight‐assignment and RB‐matching mechanisms to allocate each RB to a packet according to its flow type and length. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed RB allocation algorithm can significantly increase both throughput and fairness while reducing packet dropping and delays of real‐time flows, as compared with previous methods.