An Efficient Downlink-QoS Aware Scheduling Approach for Adopting Wyner-Ziv Code

The next-generation cellular networks are facing several challenges. Precisely, according to recent statistics, by 2021, video traffic will represent 82% of the IP traffic. This demand increase will affect the users' quality-of-service (QoS). Accordingly, integrating appropriate distributed source coding (DSC) frameworks for mobile data traffic is crucially needed. Wyner-Ziv coding is considered a great solution to the high demand for video traffic. However, in LTE-A, the current standard of quality-of-service class identifier (QCI) gives a higher priority to the best-effort traffic, i.e., FTP and the rate-constrained traffic, i.e., VoIP. This current prioritization may not be suitable for the growing demands for the delay-constrained traffic, i.e., video traffic. Accordingly, in this paper, we investigate the effect of giving higher priority to the video-traffic on the QoS. To address this problem, we propose a QoS-aware downlink scheduler in a single-cell LTE network. In the proposed packet scheduler, we use a utility-based scheduling approach to study the effect of adopting Wyner-Ziv coding with prioritizing video traffic over other traffic types. Numerical results confirm that when using the Wyner-Ziv coding, changing the traffic priority to grant the video traffic the highest, will not impact the system's performance compared to other existing schemes.