Achieving Long-Term Fairness and Optimum Multiuser Diversity Gain in Time-Varying Broadcast Channels

In this paper, a downlink system in which a single-antenna base station communicates with k single antenna users over a time-correlated fading channel is considered. It is assumed that each receiver knows its own channel state, while the rate of the channel variation for all users and the corresponding initial fading gains are known to the base station. The average (per channel use) throughput of the system is studied by applying various adaptive signaling schemes. Assuming a large number of users in the system, it is shown that using a scheduling scheme in which the base station transmits to the user with the maximum initial fading gain, while using a fixed codeword length for all users, achieves the order of the maximum throughput. Moreover, an alternative scheduling scheme is proposed (by accounting for users' delays) and shown to achieve the optimum long-term fairness, while preserving the order of the maximum throughput.