Multiuser scheduling on the LTE downlink with meta-heuristic approaches

In this paper, the issue of multi-user radio resource scheduling on the downlink of a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular communication system is addressed. An optimization model has been proposed earlier, where radio resources for multiple users are jointly allocated at the air-interface. It has been shown that an optimal solution to such a problem may provide reasonable gain over a simply greedy approach. However, the complexity of such an optimal approach could be prohibitively high. By exploiting meta-heuristic methods such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Simulated Annealing (SA), the results in this paper show that significant reduction in complexity can be obtained while achieving near-optimal solutions.