LTE_FICC: A New Mechanism for Provision of QoS and Congestion Control in LTE/LTE-Advanced Networks

Abstract

In Long Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE-Advanced architecture, the basic schedulers allocate resources without taking congestion at the Evolved NodeB (eNodeB’s) output buffer into account. This leads to buffer overflows and deterioration in overall Quality of Service (QoS). Congestion avoidance and fair bandwidth allocation is hardly considered in existing research for the LTE/LTE-Advanced uplink connections. This paper introduces a mechanism for LTE and LTE-Advanced, LTE Fair Intelligent Congestion Control (LTE_FICC), to control congestion at an eNodeB. LTE_FICC jointly exists with the scheduler at the eNodeB to guarantee efficient traffic scheduling, in order to make the output buffer operate around a target operating point. LTE_FICC also overcomes the problem of unfair bandwidth allocation among the flows that share the same eNodeB interface. LTE_FICC is simple, robust and scalable, as it uses per queue rather than per flow accounting. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, simulations were performed in Opnet using LTE module. The results demonstrated that LTE_FICC controls the eNodeB buffer effectively; prevents overflows; and ensures the QoS of flows in terms of fair bandwidth allocation, improved throughput and reduced queuing delay.