A Dynamic PF Scheduler to Improve the Cell Edge Performance

Xu Ning, Vivier Guillaume, Zhou Wen, Qiang Yongquan

China Broadband Wireless Research Center Motorola Labs Beijing, China ningxu@motorola.com approach is to allocate a set of specific frequency resources for cell edge users, mitigating the inter-cell interference and thus, increasing their performance. In this paper, we investigate an approach of using scheduler itself to provide better fairness and performance for cell edge users. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic PF scheduling algorithm. The novelty consists in adapting dynamically and on a per user basis the parameter of the PF algorithm, in order to better adapt to user specific conditions (e.g. location in the cell or QoS requirement). Our algorithm can provides better fairness and increase the seamless experience by providing more uniform QoS over the cell. The rest of this paper is outlined as follows. In section II we review and discuss traditional PF algorithm and point out its limitations in allocating resource to cell edge users. We also introduce some known modifications to the PF. Then, our Dynamic PF algorithm is presented in details in section III. Simulation results are showed in section IV and the conclusion is given in section V. II. PF AND CELL EDGE ISSUES

AbstractIn order to improve the QoS in the cell edge of broadband cellular systems, we propose to modify the Proportional Fair (PF) scheduling algorithm in a new way. In the traditional PF algorithm, a beta parameter can be used in the denominator to control the PF ratio. In our method, the beta is dynamically adjusted in a time and user depended basis, taking into account for example, the users receiving signal level. In each updating period, the value of beta may be different from different users. Therefore, the scheduling priority is adapted to individual users condition. The underlying idea is to accelerate the increase of scheduling priority when the user moves to the cell edge. Simulation results show that our dynamic PF scheduling algorithm can improve the performance of cell edge users with a limited degradation of whole system throughput. Keywords - Packet wireless systems, scheduling, cell edge performance, proportional fair

I. INTRODUCTION Packet data services with various QoS requirement play an important role in wireless communication systems, such as 3GPP LTE, 3GPP2 UWB, and WiMAX systems. Due to the variations of the wireless channel (in time, frequency and space), it is a challenge to ensure fairness and seamless experience among data users with different channel conditions and quality of service requirements. Users in the cell edge usually experience bad channel conditions, thus tend to get bad throughput and performance. Providing a consistent user experience all over the cell and especially acceptable performance at the cell borders is becoming a key requirement in future wireless communication as for instance mentioned in IMT Advanced requirement. User and packet scheduler is the main component in Media Access Control layer to control the system performance in terms of fairness and throughput. For non-real time service, Proportional Fair (PF) scheduling [1] is a well-known algorithm, which can provide long-term fairness when channel conditions of users are almost the same. In a realistic cellular scenario, when some users are in the cell edge, the averaged SINR of them will remain lower than the users in cell center. In this situation, PF can not provide good fairness and yields to performance degradation of cell edge users. Existing solution to provide better performance to cell edge users is to consider frequency reuse, or soft frequency reuse method [2], which works on top of packet scheduler. The main idea of such

A. PF Basic When providing non real time service for users, one can use standard Proportional Fair (PF) scheduling algorithm [1] to provide a good trade-off between capacity and fairness. PF scheduling is simple but effective for non real-time services. Its policy is to schedule the user j in a time slot t with:
j = arg max
k

rk [t ] Rk [t ]

(1)

(1 Rk [t ] = (1

1 1 ) Rk [t 1] + rk [t ], if k is scheduled Tc Tc 1 ) Rk [t 1], if k is not scheduled Tc

(2)

where rk, in the numerator represents the instantaneous rate of the users while Rk represents the average rate of the same user, based on the past resource allocation. The PF basically allocates the resource at a given time to the user which maximizes the ratio of instantaneous rate over average rate.

978-1-4244-1722-3/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE.

With a simple generalization, the equation (1) can be modified as:

j = arg max
k

( Rk [t ])

( rk [t ])

(3)

can explain the influence of the parameter a as follows. When a < 0 , the access terminal with smaller rk [t ] is chosen. When a > 0 , the access terminal with higher rk [t ] is chosen. When a=0, it is equivalent to the proportional fairness. In [7], the authors propose to set from 1 to . This method can both exploit multi-user diversity gains and provide flexible fairness adjustment from proportional fairness to maxmin fairness as increases from 1 to . In addition, it is proposed in [7] that Tc in (2) should update with . However, parameter is not adaptive with time or with users. In [8], a scheduling method, named Alpha-Rule is proposed. It controls and dynamically changes , which permits dynamic and real-time tradeoff between aggregate throughput and per-user throughput. The update of is performed by monitoring the averaged data rate and averaged fairness index. The parameter is decreased if averaged data rate is smaller than the target and fairness index is larger than the target. It is increased when averaged data rate is larger than the target and fairness index is smaller than the target. In this Alpha-Rule, is the same for all users in a scheduling interval. With dynamic control of , the fairness is changed between proportional fairness and Max-Min fairness, thus balancing the aggregate throughput and long-term fairness. The method in [8] only considers the long-term fairness and aggregate throughput in the system. The value of is the same for all users in one updating period. It does not treat individual user, especially cell edge users in a real-time way, since the fairness index calculation is related to all the users in the system. When individual cell-edge-users throughput is reduced, the fairness index is only slightly changed. So, this method reacts slowly when a user enters into the cell edge and can not provide good throughput and performance for cell edge users in a short-term way. Moreover, this method requires an extra component to monitor the fairness and the aggregated throughput, which requires more complexity and memory in the scheduler. Our approach is different from above mentioned methods in the following ways. 1. The parameter k [t ] is updated not only in time but also depended on users individual requirement. Different user may get different value of k [t ] in a given scheduling interval. 2. k [t ] is updated as a function of users channel condition, e.g., users averaged SINR. 3. k [t ] is updated in a range from 0 to 1 (or 0 to 2) (not as in [7][8] from 1 to infinite). 4. In our approach, the transmit opportunities of a user can be improved immediately once it moves into the cell edge, to compensate the PF penalty caused by averaged SINR reduction. Throughput and fairness of cell edge users can be hence guaranteed in a short-term basis. At last, it can provide more uniform QoS for user.

where, if = = 1 , then we get PF scheduling; if = 1, = 0 , then it is a maximum C/I scheduling; if = 0, = 1 , then it is a round-robin (RR) scheduling. This scheduling policy can be used in time-division multiplexing based packet wireless systems, such as HSPA or EV-DO. For OFDMA based system, such as 3GPP LTE or WiMax, we can simply apply this policy in each frequency sub-channel independently, as in [3]. B. Cell Edge Problem PF scheduler can balance the multi-user diversity and fairness among users. It works well when users experience homogeneous channel conditions and when the channel conditions vary rapidly. When a mobile terminal moves into the cell edge, its channel condition is usually bad compared to the channel conditions in the cell center. With pure PF scheduling policy, there are high probabilities that the scheduling priority of this cell-edge-user is small, thus preventing the user to get scheduling opportunity. To elaborate this problem, lets check the priority calculation equation (1) and the rate update equation (2). When channel condition goes to bad due to user in cell edge, the numerator rk in the priority calculation equation (1) will become small for a long term because that the bad channel condition is caused not by the small scale fading but by serious cell edge interference and high path loss. If the user has got a moderate or relative large Rk when he has been in the cell center (which is a usual case), then when he entered the cell edge, the priority becomes small for a long term because of the rk dropping. Meanwhile, the R s of other users are updated slower than the dropping rate of the cell edge user. So, in this situation, the user k can get scheduled only after the users in cell center get much more scheduling opportunity. In other words, the fairness of this cell edge user k cannot be compensated for a relatively long term due to the slow reaction capability of PF scheduler. To solve this issue of PF, several modifications have been introduced. In [4], a Data Rate Control (DRC) Exponent Rule is proposed, in which in equation (3) is set to a fixed, higherthan-one value. The control parameter is the same for all users. This method has been extended in [5], in which is adaptively updated on a per-user basis. The updating process is controlled by a monitor that checks whether the difference between the proportional data rate allocated to user and the average value over all users is within an acceptable interval. In [6], a generalized formula is proposed to computing the average rate as: Rk [t ] = (1 1 Tc ) Rk [t 1] + 1 Tc ( rk [t ])
1 a

. We

III. DYNAMIC PF SCHEDULER In order to improve the performance of users in the cell edge, we propose to modify the PF scheduling algorithm in a new way. In the standard PF algorithm, the numerator in (3) has an exponent denoted as and the dominator has an exponent denoted as . In our proposed method, in the dominator is dynamically adjusted in a user depended basis, for example, depended on users channel condition (the averaged signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR)), or users traffic parameters and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In each updating period, the value of may be different for different users. In our proposal, the scheduling priority is artificially adapted to individual users needs, e.g., the users averaged SINR (which is closely related to its location), or the QoS requirements. The underlying idea in this parameter adaptation is to accelerate the increase of scheduling priority when user is in the cell edge. Before going to details of our method, we need a mechanism to determine whether a user is in cell edge or not. Assuming the downlink pilot averaged SINR k of user k can be reported to Base Station (BS) by user k, or measured from BS through uplink pilot. A cell edge threshold can be a priori determined by network planning or dynamically set by the BS and then broadcasted to all users. Both pilot averaged SINR k and the cell edge threshold are represented in dB. A user is in the cell center when k , while in the cell edge when k . It is not the purpose of this paper to optimize the parameter value. A. Dynamic for Cell Edge Users To dynamically adjust the scheduling priority in an efficient way, the parameter can dynamically adjusted as a function of users averaged SINR. One way to do this is to set as the averaged SINR to a threshold ratio when user is in cell edge and as 1 when user is in cell center. Usually, when a user enters cell edge, this ratio (thus ) will be lower than 1, then its scheduling priority will be increased compared to the standard PF algorithm, which can compensate the priority decreasing caused by bad averaged SINR in cell edge. With this adjustment, users in cell edge will get more opportunities to transmit their data packet. A time counter is also introduced to maintain long-term fairness. We give details in the following. With the priority calculation equation below:
j = arg max
k

Alternatively, we can set k [t ] to update less aggressively:

1,

k [t ]
. k [t ] , b , k [t ] < (5)

k [t ] =

max 1 2

Because usually Rk [t ] 1 , we have

when k [t ] < . So cell edge user can get higher priority than that in a pure PF scheduler. Note that when Rk [t ] < 1 ,

( Rk [t ])

k [t ]

< Rk [t ]

( Rk [t ])

k [t ]

will be bigger than Rk [t ] , which is not what we

want. So, in (4) and (5), when Rk [t ] < 1 , we set k [t ] = 1 k [t ] . Now we explain the function of b in (4) and (5). In some scenario, although when > 0 , k may be less than 0. To ensure k [t ] > 0 , we set a parameter b as the lower bound of k [t ] in (4) and (5), where b is a small positive number. A problem arising in above design is that, if a user remains staying the cell edge for a very long time, it will violate the PF criterion of the whole system and reduce the system throughput. With this consideration, we can further improve the parameter design by introduce a time counter Tk [t ] to record the duration in which the user remain in the cell edge:
Tk [t ] = 0, k [t ] Tk [t 1] + 1, k [t ] <

(6)

With this counter, we can set:

1, Tk [t ] 0, or Tk [t ] >

k [t ] =

max

, k [t ] , b , 0 Tk [t ]

(7)

where the threshold is to indicate that the user has stayed too long in the cell edge. This time counter records the duration in which a user is in the cell edge. The adjustment of the value of is only performed within a predefined duration. When a user stays in cell edge for a relative long time (longer than ), is no longer adjusted as a function of the averaged SINR. The performance and fairness is then guaranteed by standard PF itself. B. Dynamic for All Users

( Rk [t ])

( rk [t ])

k [t ]

In addition to adapt the parameter of the cell edge user, we can adapt the of all users in the system:

we set = 1 , and k [t ] as a function of k :

1,

k [t ]
. k [t ] , b , k [t ] < (4)

k [t ] =

max

k [t ] [t ] ,b , k 2 k [t ] = , k {1,..., K } . (8) k [t ] >2 2,

max

By equation (8), the users near cell center will be punished since k tends to be larger than 1, while the users in cell edge will be compensated since the k tends to be smaller than 1. According to the discussion in last subsection, we introduce two time counters Ak [t ] and Bk [t ] to record the duration in which the user remain in the cell edge and the cell center, respectively:
Ak [t ] = Bk [t ] = 0, k [t ] Ak [t 1] + 1, k [t ] < Bk [t 1] + 1, k [t ] > 0, k [t ]

throughput of two threshold settings of Dynamic PF together with those of PF are illustrated in Figure 1 and Figure 2.
TABLE I. Parameter System carrier frequency System bandwidth 2GHz 10MHz 50 12 15KHz 1 ms 12 COST-231 lognormal distribution 8 dB GSM TU 6 ray 3 km/h 46 dBm 1km QPSK/16QAM/64QAM Turbo coding 1/5, 1/4, 3/8, 1/2, 3/4 IR SIMULATION PARAMETERS Value

(9)

Number of sub-channels in traffic channels Number of sub-carriers in each sub-channel

(10)

Bandwidth of sub-carrier sub-frame length Number of OFDM symbols in a sub-frame Distance-dependent path loss Shadowing fading Shadowing standard deviation Multi-path channel model User speed Total downlink TX power in traffic channels Cell radius Modulation type Channel coding HARQ type

With (9) and (10), we can have:

1, Ak [t ] , or, 0 Bk [t ]

k [t ] =

max

(11) k [t ] , b , 0 Ak [t ] , or, Bk [t ] > 0

for all k {1,..., K} . By (11), users in the cell edge can be compensated and users in the cell center can be punished. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS This section presents simulation results to validate the performance of the proposed method. We compare the standard PF and the proposed Dynamic PF in an OFDMA based system simulation platform. The algorithm of dynamic for cell edge users as in (7) is investigated. The main simulation parameters are listed in Table I. The simulation layout has 19 base stations and each has 3 sectors. The antenna patter A ( ) = min 12 ( 3dB ) , Am , where
2

3dB =70 degrees, and Am = 20 dB. The central sector is

interested and surrounding sectors provide interference. There are 10 users randomly distributed in the central sector. The link packet error probability is predicted based on channel SINR by effective SNR mapping methodology [9]. Full buffer traffic is considered because the comparison is irrelevant to traffic feature. Packet size in the transmit buffer is set constantly as 1500 bytes so that packet delay performance can be considered in simulation. The performance is showed by fairness index, user and system throughput. Fairness index is computed as [10]:
K 2 k =1

From Figure 1, we can see that when Dynamic PF is used, the fairness of the system is improved from 0.49 of standard PF to 0.59 ( = 5 dB) or 0.60 ( = 7 dB). In Figure 2, the throughput of cell edge users is improved from Dynamic PF to standard PF by 16.9% ( = 5 dB) and 13.4% ( = 7 dB), at the cost of a reduction in total throughput of 10.7% ( = 5 dB) and 9.2% ( = 7 dB). To demonstrate the effect of the Dynamic PF algorithm more clearly, we can take a drop as an example and examine the impact on the cell edge users. In Figure 3, the throughput of cell edge users (user 8, 9, 10) is improved by Dynamic PF by 30.0% ( = 5 dB) or 31.7% ( = 7 dB), at the cost of a reduction in total throughput of 14.2% ( = 5 dB) and 16.7% ( = 7 dB). We also simulate the packet delay performance. The delay of all packets belonging to a user is averaged and the CDF curve of the averaged packet delay of users is showed in Figure 4. With standard PF algorithm, 80% users have packet delay less than 0.68s. As for Dynamic PF, 80% users have packet delay less than 0.53s. So the packet delay performance can also be improved by our proposed algorithm. From the above simulation results, we can draw the conclusion that the cell edge users performance can be improved by the proposed Dynamic PF algorithm, while the sacrifice of the system capacity for the fairness can remain comparatively small.

I= K

rk [t ]

( r [t ] ) 2 k =1 k
K

For Dynamic PF algorithm, we set the cell edge threshold as the averaged SINR of 5 dB and 7 dB respectively. The time counter threshold is set to 500 subframes. Parameter b is set to 0.5. To provide more credible results, we run the simulation with 25 drops and each drop runs 2 second (2000 steps). The fairness index and system

V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we propose a dynamic proportional fair scheduling algorithm to provide better performance for cell edge users compared to standard PF scheduler. In our algorithm, the parameter is adjusted in a user-dependent, time-varying way. The adjustment can be controlled by the relative pilot signal strength of users. The main idea is to accelerate the competitiveness of cell edge users. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the performance of cell edge users with a little degradation of the whole system throughput.
1 0.9 0.8

1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6

0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8

standard PF Dynamic PF ( = 5 dB ) Dynamic PF ( = 7 dB )

CDF

1.2

1.4

1.6

Average packet delay (second)

Dynamic PF ( = 7 dB) Dynamic PF ( = 5 dB) standard PF

Figure 4. Packet delay comparison

Fairness Index

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 1

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Figure 1. Fairness index comparison

9000 8000 7000

System Throughput

Throughput (Kbps)

6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 1

standard PF Dynamic PF ( = 5dB) Dynamic PF ( = 7dB)

Cell Edge Users Throughput

Figure 2. System throughput comparison

600

500

User Throughput (Kbps)

standard PF Dynamic PF ( = 5 dB) Dynamic PF ( = 7 dB)

400

300

200

100

10

User Index

Figure 3. Users throughput comparison