Temporal fairness enhanced scheduling for cooperative relaying networks in low mobility fading environments

We consider a wireless network, which consists of several active source/destination pairs and a number of idle nodes. Multiple nodes volunteer as relays to facilitate the communication. All nodes have low mobility and the fading channel is essentially constant over the latency time scale of interest (block fading). Conventional adaptive scheduling techniques are either unfair or inefficient in this context. In A. Wittneben et al. (2004) we proposed a scheduling scheme which does not compromise the quality of service of individual source/destination links (fairness) if the number of relay nodes is sufficiently high. In this paper we propose a simple extension to our scheduling scheme which guarantees short-term temporal fairness among the individual links in the network, while achieving considerable multi-user diversity gains.