On the Capacity-Fairness Tradeoff in Multiuser Diversity Systems

Conventional multiuser diversity maximizes the system throughput but results in an unfair scheduling of the system resources across users. Proportional fair scheduling types of systems achieve strict fairness among different users, but this fairness comes at the cost of a significant system capacity penalty. In this paper, we propose two forms of a hybrid multiuser scheduling scheme that provides a flexible balance/tradeoff between the system achievable capacity and the fairness among users. Our results show that the capacity versus fairness tradeoff can be achieved by grouping users and then using a two-step selection process.