Performance of different scheduling strategies in a packet radio system

The introduction of packet switched data in cellular systems requires new radio resource algorithms. For example, a scheduling algorithm is needed when more than one user may share the same physical channel, to determine the order in which users on the same channel should be allowed to transmit. This paper discusses the scheduling problem in general, and investigates the performance of three basic scheduling algorithms in an enhanced data rates for global GSM evolution/general packet radio service (EDGE/GPRS) system. Effort has been spent on modeling the bursty interference of a packet data network and using appropriate performance measures for the evaluation of such a network. The results indicate that the choice of scheduling discipline is very important, especially in a highly loaded system. With the performance measures used here, it is more important to consider the packet sizes than the users' different channel qualities.