Issues in Scheduling Multimedia Traffic over the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) link of UMTS

In this paper, some issues in scheduling multimedia traffic over the HSDPA link of UMTS are addressed. Unlike previous contributions, the focus is on the case where packets having different QoS attributes need to be delivered to a specific user as part of a multimedia application packet delivery process. The following packet scheduling algorithms were considered: Max C/I, Proportional Fair (PF) and a new algorithm called Largest Average Weighted Delay First (L-AWDF). These algorithms were modified to provide static or dynamic priority to traffic streams belonging to the same user. It was found that the L-AWDF static and L-AWDF dynamic algorithms were more successful in reducing the percentage of packets dropped by the transaction and streaming components of the multimedia application than PF static and Max-CI static. L-AWDF dynamic gave lower average delay for the block traffic component than L-AWDF static. However, L-AWDF static gave the best performance for the transaction traffic component.