  The bulk of the research on Long Term Evolution/Long Term Evolution-Advanced
packet scheduling is concentrated in the downlink and the uplink is
comparatively less explored. In up-link, channel aware scheduling with
throughput maximization has been widely studied while considering an infinitely
back-logged buffer model, which makes the investigations unrealistic.
Therefore, we propose an optimal uplink packet scheduling pro-cedure with
realistic traffic sources. Firstly, we advocate a joint channel and buffer
aware algorithm, which maximizes the actual transmitted bit-count. Thereafter,
we introduce delay constraints in our algorithm to support real-time traffic.
We further enhance our algorithm by incorporating the varied delay and
throughput requirements demanded by mixed traffic classes. Finally, we
in-troduce priority flipping to minimize bandwidth starvation of lower priority
traffic in presence of higher percentage of high priority traffic. We observe
that a delay constraint may render the optimization-based proposals infeasible.
Therefore, to avoid infeasibility, we replace the delay constraint with delay
outage minimization (DOM). DOM aims at minimizing the packet drop due to delay
violation. Moreover, DOM also helps in reducing the problems to a well-known
assignment problem, which can be solved by applying the Hungarian algorithm.
Hence, our approach delivers an optimal allocation with low computational
complexity.
