MAC Scheduling Scheme for VoIP Trafc Service in 3G LTE

Sunggu Choi , Kyungkoo Jun , Yeonseung Shin , Seokhoon Kang , Byoungjo Choi
Telecommunication Research Lab. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea Email: {sguchoi, shinys}@etri.re.kr Dept. of Multimedia Systems Engineering University of Incheon, Koea Email: {kjun, hana, bjc97r}@incheon.ac.kr
Abstract3G Long Term Evolution, which aims for various mobile multimedia services provision by enhanced wireless performance, proposes the VoIP-based voice service through the PS domain. When delay and loss-sensitive VoIP trafc ows through the PS domain, more challenging technical difculties are expected than in the existing 3G systems which provide the CS domain based voice service. Moreover, since 3G LTE, which adopts the OFDM as its physical layer, introduces Physical Resource Block (PRB) as the unit for the transmission resources, it becomes necessary to develop new types of resource management schemes. This paper proposes a MAC layer PRB scheduling algorithm for the efcient VoIP service in 3G LTE and shows the simulation results regarding its performance. The key idea of the algorithm consists of two parts; dynamic activation of a VoIP priority mode for the voice QoS satisfaction and adaptive adjustment of the VoIP priority mode duration in order to minimize the performance degradation induced by its priority mode application.
Mobile

I. I NTRODUCTION 3G Long Term Evolution (3G LTE) is a mobile cellular communications technology aiming for maximum 100 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink speed when using 20 MHz bandwidth, thus enables diverse mobile multimedia service provision [1]. However, we expect many technological challenges for successful 3G LTE based services. One of such difculties is regarding voice service provision. In existing CDMA and WCDMA based cellular systems, the voice service is provided separate in Circuit Switching (CS) domain unlike other data services which are provided in Packet Switching (PS ) domain, but 3G LTE is designed to provide all services including the voice service in the IP based PS domain. The QoS provision for the VoIP trafc in the PS domain is hard because the VoIP service is sensitive to packet delay and loss. Nevertheless, users expect higher voice service quality from 3G LTE than that of CS domain based voice services of existing cellular systems. Therefore, it is pivotal to satisfy the QoS of VoIP based voice services in 3G LTE. Other cellular systems such as CDMA2000 1xEV-DO propose, in addition to various network QoS provision schemes, voice processing techniques like smart blanking and adaptive anti-jitter playback buffering to support the voice service of which quality is not poorer than that of CS domain based voice services [2]. But, there is a worry that, unless the fading effect

of wireless links is carefully considered, the performance of VoIP based voice service may be optimistically overestimated [3]. When taking into account both wireless specic fading and the delay and loss sensitive VoIP characteristics, the successful voice service implementation in the PS domain is challenging. Prioritization of VoIP packets simply for the QoS satisfaction over other trafc packets is undesirable because it may degrade the overall system performance and it may harm the QoS satisfaction of other multimedia calls. Therefore, it suggests that a sort of adaptive prioritization is more preferable than just granting absolute priority to VoIP trafc. Another difculty in the voice service of 3G LTE stems from a new transmission resource modeling adopted in 3G LTE. Unlike existing CDMA based cellular systems, 3G LTE takes Physical Resource Block (PRB) as its transmission resource unit; the PRB is a basic transmission unit which has both frequency and time aspects. For example, the MAC scheduling in 3G LTE is to assign PRBs to ongoing calls at every Transmission Time Interval (TTI). Evolved NodeBs (eNodeBs), which are the base stations of 3G LTE, have a xed number of available PRBs according to their bandwidth and are responsible for allocating PRBs repeatedly at every TTI [4]. In this paper, we propose a MAC layer scheduling scheme for the QoS satisfaction of VoIP based voice service in 3G LTE. The goal of our proposed scheme is to support the QoS of VoIP trafc but minimize possible negative effect on the overall system performance and efciency, particularly, the downlink throughput. The key ideas of our scheme are a VoIP priority mode and its adaptive duration management. Since the VoIP priority mode assigns PRBs rst to VoIP calls, it is able to minimize VoIP packet delay and loss, but the adaptive duration management is able to prevent the overall system performance degradation, which is a possible negative effect of the VoIP priority mode. In our scheme, the duration of VoIP priority mode is dynamically adjusted according to VoIP packet drop rates. As a result, we are able to achieve both the QoS satisfaction and the minimization of the negative effect. Our contributions presented in this paper are as follows. an eNodeB resource management framework of 3G LTE

1-4244-0264-6/07/$25.00 2007 IEEE

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 a MAC layer scheduling scheme to support the QoS of VoIP trafc a simulation of the proposed scheme to evaluate the performance regarding the QoS support and analyze the effect on the system throughput II. S YSTEM M ODEL User mobile terminals and service providing eNodeBs are within the scope of this paper, and the resource management for downlink transmission is the main target of our proposed scheme. In this section, we introduce the characteristics of the PRBs, which are the transmission resources, and the resource management structure of the eNodeBs.
Frequency

Intervals (TTIs). In this paper we assume that the allocated PRBs are able to carry only data bits from the corresponding calls. In the case of multiplexing in which it is feasible for a PRB to contain data bits from different calls, the shortcomings are that scheduling itself becomes complicated and the signaling overhead increases. However, because the multiplexing is able to improve the efciency of the PRB allocation, the discussion about the support of multiplexing by using Virtual Resource Block (VRB) is active in 3GPP meetings [4].
User call Downlink Traffic New Call Admission Request

Radio Admission Control

Bandwidth

Free PRB

per Call flow traffic eNodeB and Downlink Status Info. QoS Scheduler QoS Scheduler PRB allocation - CQI - Queue length - VoIP packet drop rate

12 Subcarriers

Allocated PRB
0.5 ms 1 ms 0.5 ms

Time

eNodeB

Available PRBs

TTI

TTI

TTI

TTI

Fig. 1. PRBs

The structure and allocation of the eNodeB transmission resource,

OFDM based wireless transmission

Figure 1 shows the structure of the PRBs and an example of the PRB allocation schemes by the eNodeBs. As aforementioned, the PRB is the smallest transmission unit in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based wireless systems. The PRB has both frequency and time aspects: it consists of m subcarriers in frequency while n subframes each of which is 0.5 ms long. In the current 3G LTE standard recommendation, one PRB is dened as 12 subcarriers and 2 subframes [5][6]. The amount of data bits that can be carried by one PRB is determined by wireless channel environment between eNodeBs and user mobile terminals. It is because 3G LTE, like HSDPA based cellular systems, uses Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) which changes modulation and coding schemes depending on wireless link conditions. The resource management structure of eNodeBs, as shown in Figure 2, consists of three functions; Radio Admission Control (RAC), MAC scheduling, and state information management. The RAC determines whether to admit new call requests, the MAC scheduling allocates the PRBs over ongoing calls, and the state information management function collects and store data such as wireless link conditions, packet drop and loss rates, queue lengths, which will be discussed shortly. The downlink MAC scheduler determines how many PRBs should be assigned to each ongoing call at Transmission Time

Fig. 2.

The eNodeB structure with separate queues for user calls

We also assume that, as shown in Figure 2, eNodeBs have separate transmission queues for each downlink user call. Thus, the role of the MAC scheduler can be rephrased as the PRB allocation to the transmission queues. This separate queue structure enables the following: one user mobile terminal has more than one ongoing downlink calls and each call is independently scheduled. This design is advantageous particularly in the sense that the QoS provision, which differs according to call trafc types, becomes simple. The state information management function collects and stores data necessary for the RAC and the MAC scheduling operations. We assume that this function stores the following data; per terminal Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) information showing downlink wireless link conditions, average queue length of each transmission queues, VoIP packet drop ratio due to excessive delay, and other related information. III. P ROPOSED A LGORITHM The purpose of our proposed algorithm is to satisfy the QoS of VoIP calls and, at the same time, minimize negative impact, which is induced when prioritizing the VoIP calls, on overall system performance.

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The cores of the proposed algorithm are a VoIP priority mode and adaptive control of the VoIP priority mode duration period. The VoIP priority mode is to schedule only the VoIP packet data over TTI, in other words, assign PRBs only to VoIP calls in order to satisfy the QoS of the voice service. The adaptive control of this modes duration is to prevent system performance degradation, which will be discussed shortly. The activation of the VoIP priority mode is determined at every TTI by considering whether ongoing VoIP calls exist as well as how long the VoIP priority mode has continued. One thing to note is that, even in the VoIP priority mode, remaining PRBs after the allocation to VoIP calls are assigned to other types calls in order to avoid the resource waste. The continuation period of the VoIP priority mode is restricted because it can degrade overall system performance by excessively concentrating eNodeB resources on VoIP calls, which are usually inefcient in the sense of PRB utilization due to small packet sizes. The limit of consecutive application of the VoIP priority mode is adaptively changed between prespecied minimum and maximum according to VoIP packet drop ratio. For example, high drop ratio implies, in part, that there are many ongoing VoIP calls, thus it is necessary to increase the limit in order to allow more consecutive TTIs to be dedicated to VoIP calls. On the contrary, low drop ratio means that the QoS of VoIP calls are satised at decent level, it is safe to reduce the duration of the VoIP priority mode to serve more other types calls. The details of the proposed algorithm are presented later. Our PRB allocation scheme is designed by making modications to Channel Adaptive Fair Queuing [7]. Basically the MAC scheduler allocates the PRBs to ongoing calls in a round robin way, but we determine the scheduling order of calls according to the sizes of the following factors; the queue length and SINR of each call. The larger the factor values are, the earlier the corresponding call is scheduled. In our scheme, we use the following equation 1, Df (i) = Qlen (i) i (1)

at every TTI, and the second one is the adjustment of the maximum number of consecutive TTIs to which the VoIP priority mode is applied. The second part also operates at every TTI.
Scheduling Start at every TTI

Yes

Is there VoIP calls?

No

Apply VoIP priority mode

Yes

Apply Normal mode

Successive count of the VoIP priority mode > Limit

Factor = Queue Len.* SINR

Schedule calls with larger factor values first Factor = Queue Len. * SINR Yes Schedule VoIP calls with larger factor values first Yes Yes PRBs remain & More VoIP calls to send data?

PRBs remain & More calls to send data?

No No

PRBs remain?

No

End of Scheduling

Fig. 3.

Scheduling algorithm at every TTI

where Qlen (i) and i is the queue length and the SINR value of ongoing call i respectively. The aforementioned equation 1 implies that, the longer the queue is and the better the wireless link state is, the earlier a corresponding call is scheduled to have the PRBs. The order calculation is executed at every TTI. After the scheduling order is determined, the MAC scheduler assigns, in principle, one PRB to a call at a time, however it often happens that it is necessary to allocate more than one PRBs to calls. For example, the size of one packet is larger than the capacity of one PRB but the packet segmentation is not allowed, then two or more PRBs are allocated. If there are still remaining PRBs at the end of the round-robin cycle, the allocation starts again in the same order and it repeats until there is no available PRB or no call has data to send. The details of our proposed scheme largely consist of two algorithms. The rst one is the PRB allocation which operates

The ow chart of the PRB allocation algorithm is shown in Figure 3. At the start of the scheduling process at every TTI, the activation of the VoIP priority mode is determined by whether there exist VoIP calls or not, and also whether the count of the consecutive VoIP priority mode enabled TTIs exceeds the limit. For example, if there exist VoIP calls and the count is below the limit, the VoIP priority mode is turned on. Otherwise, the normal mode is set and the count is reset. Only VoIP calls, if the VoIP priority mode is used, or all ongoing calls, in the case of the normal mode, are allocated one PRB at a time as described earlier; in a round robin way but the calls with long queues and a good wireless links are rst. It continues as long as there are remaining PRBs and there are calls to have data to send. Particularly in the VoIP priority mode, if there are still available PRBs at the end of VoIP call only scheduling, the remaining PRBs are allocated to non VoIP calls in the same way of the normal mode. It prevents PRB resources from being wasted. The adjustment algorithm for the maximum allowable count of consecutive VoIP priority TTIs is shown in Figure 4. The maximum count increases or decreases depending on overall VoIP packet drop ratio which is measured at the eNodeB. By using preset minimum and maximum thresholds for the VoIP packet drop ratio, if the drop ratio is below the minimum threshold, the maximum consecutive count decreases by one because it implies that either there are enough resources or

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Start the adjustment of the limit, Cont, for consecutive VoIP priority mode application

TABLE I S IMULATION PARAMETERS Simulation Parameter Values 1 Km 5 MHz 12 subcarriers, 2 subframes 1 msec. 6 20 msec. 4.5% 1.5% QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM

Calculate VoIP packet drop rate, d

Cell radius

Decrease the limit by one, Cont = Cont 1; Keep the limit larger than the minimum, if (Cont < Cont_min) Cont = Cont_min

VoIP packet drop rate is smaller than the minimum threshold

Bandwidth PRB structure TTI Num. of available PRBs Maximum VoIP packet delay at eNodeB Maximum VoIP packet drop rate, Tmax Minimum VoIP packet drop rate, Tmin Modulations for AMC

Increase the limit two times, Cont = 2 * Cont; Keep the limit smaller than the maximum if (Cont > Cont_max) Cont = Cont_max Yes

Fig. 4. Algorithm for determining the allowable count of consecutive VoIP priority mode application

VoIP calls are given sufcient number of PRBs. On the contrary, if the drop ratio is above the maximum threshold, the maximum count is doubled because it means that the PRBs allocated to VoIP calls are not enough. Finally, if the drop rate stays between the minimum and maximum threshold, the current maximum count is kept. We adjust the maximum success count asymmetrically as described earlier; linearly decrease and exponentially increase. It is to be conservative in managing resources for VoIP trafc because VoIP packets are sensitive to delay and loss. IV. S IMULATION FOR THE P ROPOSED A LGORITHM P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION We conduct simulations to analyze the impact of our proposed algorithm on the QoS satisfaction of VoIP calls and the overall performance of eNodeB. The parameters to simulate the eNodeB and user mobile terminals are as shown in Table I. To analyze the effect of the VoIP priority mode, which is the core of our proposed algorithm, we compare the performance of our algorithm with that of a kind of CAFQ algorithm, which uses the same PRB allocation scheme as ours except that it does not have the VoIP priority mode. To analyze quantitatively the QoS satisfaction of VoIP trafc and the performance of eNodeB when using each algorithm, we measure the average VoIP packet drop rate per unit time and the average throughput of eNodeB as we increase the number of ongoing VoIP calls gradually while there are a xed number of other type calls. We assume that VoIP packets are considered as dropped unless they are retransmitted to user terminals within 20 ms after they arrive at eNodeB. The VoIP packet drop rates, as shown in Figure 5, are measured and plotted on Y axis as we increase the number of VoIP calls step by step from one to maximum fty on X

Yes

rd < Tmin
No VoIP packet drop rate is larget than the maximum threshold

rd > Tmax
No

Keep the current limit Cont = Cont;

axis. Particularly, since 5% packet drop rate of VoIP trafc is considered as the maximum allowable drop rate to meet the QoS, it is represented as a separate solid line. As shown in Figure 5, it is observed that, when the VoIP priority is not used, the packet drop rate rises rapidly as the number of ongoing VoIP calls increases. Especially, when the number of VoIP calls is just 10, the drop rate already reaches the maximum allowable rate, 5%. On the contrary, when using our proposed VoIP priority mode, the drop rates remain at low level around 1% in spite of the increase of VoIP calls, for example, less than 1% drop rate even when 50 VoIP calls are in progress. This simulation results shows that the VoIP priority mode plays a signicant role in guaranteeing the QoS of VoIP calls.

Fig. 5.

The VoIP packet drop rate comparison

There may be negative effects when using the VoIP priority mode even though this mode proved to be quite effective for the QoS of VoIP as just shown in the above. A possible

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Fig. 6. ratio

The eNodeB throughput comparison and the throughput decrease

negative effect is that our proposed mode might degrade the efciency of the eNodeB resource utilization because VoIP calls are seldom able to fully utilize the allocated PRB capacity. It is due to the fact that VoIP packet sizes are small and the queue length of VoIP calls are short, thus VoIP calls generally have small amount of data to transmit, not enough amount to ll up assigned PRBs. The drop of excessively delayed packets in queues makes the VoIP queue length even shorter. To analyze such negative effect of the VoIP priority mode, we conduct a simulation and measure the downlink throughput of eNodeB under the same environment as Figure 5. Figure 6 shows the overall throughput of eNodeB, as the number of VoIP calls increases gradually, for the VoIP priority mode and the normal mode respectively. In addition, the decrease ratio of the throughput of the VoIP priority mode to that of the normal mode is separately plotted in percentage terms in order to easily observe how much throughput degradation is induced by the VoIP priority mode. As shown in Figure 6, the throughput of both modes, regardless of using the VoIP priority mode or not, decreases as the number of VoIP calls increases. It is because the PRB utilization, which means how much capacity of an allocated PRB is used, of VoIP calls is low as aforementioned. However, the decrease amount of the normal mode is smaller than that of the VoIP priority mode because non-realtime calls, which the normal mode schedules earlier than VoIP calls, have generally higher PRB utilization than VoIP calls. We discuss in sequence, rstly, why the normal mode schedules non realtime calls rst, and secondly why nonrealtime calls have higher PRB utilization. At rst, since the queue lengths of nonrealtime calls are usually longer than those of VoIP calls, the scheduler, of the normal mode which takes only wireless link condition and queue length into account, schedules with high probability nonrealtime calls earlier. The long queue length of nonrealtime calls is due to the fact that nonrealtime

packets, which endure relatively long delay, are able to stay longer in queues. Secondly, the higher PRB utilization of non realtime calls is due to the fact that nonrealtime calls, when scheduled, have large enough data to ll up allocated PRB because of long queues. When observing the throughput decrease ratio in Figure 6, the negative effect of the VoIP priority mode on the overall throughput is negligible. The decrease ratio of the VoIP priority mode to the normal mode is just less than 3% even when 50 VoIP calls are ongoing. Such minimization of throughput decrease is made possible because the consecutive application of the VoIP priority mode are adaptively restricted and remaining PRBs, even when using the VoIP priority mode, are allocated to nonrealtime calls in order to avoid resource waste. In summary, our proposed scheme, the VoIP priority mode and the adaptive adjustment of consecutive priority mode application, is able to satisfy the QoS of VoIP based voice service and, at the same time, minimize the throughput decrease. Particularly, the fact that, when not using the VoIP priority mode in the simulation, very few VoIP calls were able to be served in the packet drop rate aspect, highlights the signicance of the VoIP priority mode. V. C ONCLUSIONS In this paper, we proposed an efcient VoIP packet scheduling scheme for the voice service in 3G LTE. The cores of our scheme are the VoIP priority mode and the adaptive duration adjustment of the mode application. As a result of applying our scheme, we were able to satisfy the QoS of VoIP calls by scheduling VoIP packets rst, but minimize the negative impact of the VoIP priority mode on the overall system performance by adaptively adjusting consecutive VoIP priority mode application. By conducting the simulations, we found that our scheme was able to keep the VoIP packet drop rate below 5%, which is the maximum allowable drop rate to support the QoS of VoIP, but the throughput decrease ratio was less than 3%. R EFERENCES
[1] 3GPP, Requirements for Evolved UTRA (E-UTRA) and Evolved UTRAN (E-UTRAN), TR 25.913 v7.3.0. [2] M. Yavuz, S. Diaz, R. Kapoor, M. Grob, P. Black, Y. Tokgoz, C. Lott, VoIP over CDMA2000 1xEVDO Revision A, IEEE Communications Magazine, Feb. 2006. [3] O. Awoniyi, F. Tobagi, Effect of Fading on the Performance of VoIP in IEEE 802.11a WLANs, in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications 2004. [4] 3GPP, Physical layer aspects for evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA), TR 25.814 v7.1.0. [5] NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Panasonic, Sharp, Further Investigations on Resource Block Sie for E-UTRA, R1-062714, 3GPP. [6] Nokia, Considerations for minimum TTI size for downlink LTE, R1062819, 3GPP. [7] L. Wang, Y. Kwok, W. Lau, V. Lau, Channel adaptive fair queueing for scheduling integrated voice and data services in multicode CDMA systems, Computer Communications. 27(9):809820, June 2004.

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