Video Streaming in 3.5G: On Throughput-Delay Performance of Proportional Fair Scheduling

In this paper, we study the performance of the proportional fair scheduler, which has been proposed for the emerging 3.5G radio access systems. It maximizes the spectral efficiency of the systems, which is a strong incentive for network providers to use it. Our goal is to investigate whether the proportional fair scheduler also provides benefits to the streaming users. Focus is on the throughput-delay trade-offs associated with video streaming over HSDPA. Special attention is devoted to defining appropriate performance measures and creating a realistic simulation environment. Our results indicate that the opportunistic scheduling faces major difficulties in providing the user-level performance in cases where streaming flows constitute a significant share of the traffic load.