$\alpha$-Fair Resource Allocation for Downlink Multiuser Short Packet Communications

Short packet communications are promising techniques to satisfy the stringent latency requirements of delay sensitive applications. Existing works on short packet communications considered either sum throughput maximization or max-min throughput maximization, which correspond to zero fairness and absolute fairness among devices, respectively. Different from that, this paper adopts the
$\alpha$
-fairness metric, which offers a controllable fairness, and investigates the resource allocation problem in a downlink multiuser short packet communication system to maximize the sum
$\alpha$
-fair utility by optimizing the bandwidth unit allocation, power allocation and decoding error probability. A suboptimal solution is derived based on the block coordinate descent method and the successive convex approximation method. The effectiveness of the proposed solution in achieving flexible tradeoff between fairness and sum throughput is demonstrated by simulation results.