Study of buffer aware scheduling for video streaming in LTE network

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) network provides high bandwidth, flexible modulation and coding scheme for emerging mobile applications. The issues of power saving and quality of services are very critical for the success of deployment of mobile applications. This paper presents a buffer aware scheduling approach to reduce power consumption while maintaining the receiving quality of video streaming in LTE network. The proposed buffer aware scheduler considers the buffer length and channel conditions of the user equipment (UE) to allocate radio resource so that the UE can receive video data as much as possible when it is in the RRC_Connected state and has good channel condition, while it will stay in the RRC_Idle state as longer as possible to save power given that its reserved video data in the buffer is enough to play. Both of 720P and 1080P resolution video traffic models were applied for exhaustive simulations to examine the performance of the proposed scheme by comparing to that of the Proportional Fair (PF) scheme. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheduling can significantly improve the power utilization, buffer underflow and system throughput.