Generalized Proportional Fair Scheduling in Third Generation Wireless Data Networks

—In 3G data networks, network operators would like to balance system throughput while serving users in a fair manner. This is achieved using the notion of proportional fairness. However, so far, proportional fairness has been applied at each base station independently. Such an approach can result in non-Pareto optimal bandwidth allocation when considering the network as a whole. Therefore, it is important to consider proportional fairness in a network-wide context with user associations to base stations governed by optimizing a generalized proportional fairness objective. In this paper, we take the first step in formulating and studying this problem rigorously. We show that the general problem is NP-hard and it is also hard to obtain a close-to-optimal solution. We then consider a special case where multi-user diversity only depends on the number of users scheduled together. We propose efficient offline optimal algorithms and heuristic-based greedy online algorithms to solve this ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Tian Bu, L. Li, Ramachandran Ramjee
• Keywords: Base Station, Communications, Generalized Proportional Fairness, INFOCOM 2006, Proportional Fairness