System Level Performance Evaluation of Radio Resource Allocation Strategies for LTE Networks

This dissertation addresses the performance evaluation of radio resource management (RRM) for 3GPP LTE OFDMA Cellular data networks. The radio resource allocation strategies address processes in which the availble scarce and prohibitively expensive radio resources are assigned to each active user. An efficient scheduling algorithm plays an important role for effiective utilization of radio resources, high spectrum effieicncy, low latency, and fairness among users whithin a system as well as for the entire system performance.;The research work presented in this dissertation focuses on the performance evaluation of the common packet scheduling algorithms, namely Maximum Rate (MR), Round Robin (RR), and Proportional Fair (PF). Only the scheduling for the downlink (DL) transmission of the LTE cellular systems is considered. The performance evaluation is performed for a regular hexagonal multi cell deployment, unversal frequency reuse scheme, Single Input Single Outpt(SISO) versus spatial multiplexing (SM) Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) omnidirectional antenna confugrations, various bandwidth sizes, Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) technique, and multipath selective fading channel conditions through Monte Carlo type simulations.;The design of the custom built system level simulator, implementation of various scenarios of the LTE system, and the simulator findings are thoroughly described in the document. The simulator presents an universal framework for performance evaluation of existing and for development of new scheduling algorithms.