Heuristic Maxmin Fairness for the Wireless Channel Allocation Problem

In this contribution, we will reveal some problems related to the transition of the maxmin fairness concept from the continuous to the discrete domain. By means of the wireless channel allocation problem, a heuristic approach to fairness allocation will be presented, based on searching for allocations with high similarity of the corresponding throughputs and high total throughput at the same time. Thus, the proposed approach overcomes stated problems with discrete fairness by capturing the characterisitics of fairness as comparison criterion among solutions. A meta-heuristic algorithm is proposed to handle this problem, and results are presented for problem scales, where a complete analysis is still possible. The approach is demonstrated to sufficiently follow up the maxmin fairness states with regard to performance, while definitely excluding any artifacts arising from the transition of maxmin fair allocations to the discrete domain.