Fair scheduling in multirate wireless access networks

Wireless access networks such as IEEE 802.16 employ a multi-rate physical layer. Such physical layer designs rely on a user-defined link adaptation mechanism that changes the coding and modulation schemes, thus the transmission rate, in order to maintain link reliability at a desired level under different channel conditions. The multirate operation has a significant effect on the fairness of the services provided in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. In this paper, we present methods and algorithms for fair scheduling in such multirate wireless networks. We define fairness in terms of temporal or throughput fair services, and present different methods for fair service provisioning. For this purpose, we first discuss the concepts behind fair scheduling in variable bitrate networks, and then examine a few specific algorithms. We analyze the performance of these algorithms using simulation experiments.