12

Quality of Service and Bandwidth Reservation

This chapter discusses how quality of service management and bandwidth provisioning are performed in LTE (based on 3GPP Release 9) and LTE-Advanced (based on Release 10). The standard is presented in a manner that illustrates measures for QoS performance, service classification, signaling for bandwidth requests and grants, and bandwidth allocation and traffic handling.

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 12.1 introduces 3GPP's measures of QoS performance, while Section 12.2 discusses traffic classification. Section 12.3 Reviews the signaling for making bandwidth requests and grants, and describes the distinctions between the dedicated bearer and the default bearer. Meanwhile, Section 12.4 discusses bandwidth allocation and traffic handling, and offers an overview of LTE scheduling, both in the OFDMA downlink and the SC-FDMA uplink, in addition to the wireless channel reliability mechanisms. QoS in LTE-Advanced is described in Section 12.5, and provides descriptions for the IMT-Advanced technology's new features such as carrier aggregation, coordinated multipoint transmission and relaying.