Design of Fair Weights for Heterogeneous Traffic Scheduling in Multichannel Wireless Networks

Fair weights have been implemented to maintain fairness in recent resource allocation schemes. However, designing fair weights for multiservice wireless networks is not trivial because users´ rate requirements are heterogeneous and their channel gains are variable. In this paper, we design fair weights for opportunistic scheduling of heterogeneous traffic in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. The fair weights determine each user´s share of rate for maintaining a utility notion of fairness. We then present a scheduling scheme which enforces users´ long term average transmission rates to be proportional to the fair weights. The proposed scheduler takes the advantage of users´ channel state information and the inherent flexibility of OFDMA resource allocation for efficient resource utilization. Furthermore, using the fair weights allows flexibility for realization of different scheduling schemes which accommodate a variety of requirements in terms of heterogeneous traffic types and user mobility. Simulation based performance analysis is presented to demonstrate efficacy of the proposed solution in this paper.