Maintaining Utility Fairness Using Weighting Factors in Wireless Networks

Maintaining fairness using weighting factors is a common approach in resource allocation. However, computing weighting factors for multiservice wireless networks is not trivial because users' rate requirements are heterogeneous and their channel gains are variable. In this paper, we propose weighting factor computation and scheduling schemes for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. The weighting factor computation scheme determines each user's share of rate for maintaining a utility notion of fairness. We then present a scheduling scheme which takes the users' weighting factors into consideration to allocate sub-carriers and power in OFDMA networks. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheduling scheme outperforms an opportunistic scheme in terms of fairness performance in different scenarios, where the users are fixed or mobile.