Scheduling of Mixed Traffic over MC-CDMA under Varying Load and Channel Conditions

In this work we will investigate the performance of different strategies when trying to schedule mixed traffic (video streaming with tight bounds on the delay jitter, and unconstrained delay data with a given throughput target) over a multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) air interface. In particular, a channel- and application- aware scheduling strategy is proposed and compared to a traditional maximum throughput algorithm. In our approach, fluctuations in the channel conditions of different users can be exploited via statistical multiplexing, while application-specific constraints (eg, on the delay of the relevant service) are also considered in the scheduling decision. Furthermore, we apply buffer management at the radio link layer to drop (possibly) outdated packets that are of less importance to the achievable quality. We will show that with clever choice of the parameters of our advanced algorithm we can support a larger number of satisfied video users at the expense of an increased average transmission delay for data users.