Towards Opportunistic Fair Scheduling in Wireless Networks

Opportunistic transmission scheduling schemes improve system capacity by taking advantage of independent time varying channels in wireless networks. In the design of such scheduling schemes, the fairness criterion plays an important role in the tradeoff of total system capacity and the achievable throughput of individual users. To meet different fairness demands with a unified opportunistic scheduling scheme, in this paper, we have extended the well known opportunistic scheduling scheme PFS into αPFS, which satisfies arbitrary fairness demands, varying from proportional fairness to maxmin fairness, through adjusting the parameter α. To further improve the achievable diversity gains of αPFS, we extend the αPFS scheme into an αPFS-P scheme. Performances of αPFS and αPFS-P are studied and compared. As demonstrated in the simulation results, both αPFS and αPFS-P can achieve adjustable fairness criteria, varying from proportional fairness to max-min fairness. Compared with αPFS, αPFS-P achieves higher diversity gains with degraded short term performance, which is still better than the performance of PFS.