Design of a unified multimedia-aware framework for resource allocation in LTE femtocells

In future 4G communication networks, it is expected that most of the bandwidth will be used to serve multimedia applications. Thus, there is a need for scheduling mechanisms, which can manage various types of multimedia communication (interactive, conversation, video streaming, etc.) and provide adequate Quality of Experience according to the application needs. The most promising candidate for 4G systems, i.e., Long Term Evolution, also integrates femtocells as a cost-effective solution for pervasive communication. In such a scenario, the implementation of effective scheduling mechanisms becomes even more important. Finally, before implementing scheduling policies on real devices, validation through simulation studies is often employed. For all these reasons, we investigated the implementation of an adaptive scheduling mechanism for an LTE scenario with femtocells within the well known ns3 simulator. This paper describes the preliminary steps of this activity.