Implementation and Validation of LTE Downlink Schedulers for ns-3

In LTE systems, the downlink scheduler is an essential component for efficient radio resource utilization; hence, in the context of LTE simulation, the availability of good downlink scheduler models is very important. At the time this work started, the LTE module of the ns-3 simulator only supported two types of scheduler, namely Round Robin and Proportional Fair. To overcome this limitation, we implemented in ns-3 several well-known downlink LTE scheduler algorithms, namely maximum throughput, throughput to average, blind equal throughput, token bank fair queue and priority set. In this paper, we first describe in detail their design and implementation, and then discuss their validation done by comparison with the theoretical performance in some reference scenarios.