Fairness enhancement of link adaptation techniques in wireless access networks

Link adaptation techniques, such as power control and adaptive coding and modulation, aim at maximizing the throughput in wireless networks while maintaining the signal quality in terms of the signal to interference ratio. However, fair resource allocation among different users must be taken into consideration, particularly in fixed broadband wireless access networks. The low/no mobility of users in such networks can lead to location-dependent resource utilization, which causes a significant variation in the performance from a user to another. For instance, adaptive coding and modulation schemes increase the aggregate throughput in the network; however, they also increase the variation of the throughput among users. In this paper, we propose, and analyze the performance of, three fairness enhancement schemes that can be integrated with link adaptation techniques. Results show that the three proposed scheme can enhance the fairness of link adaptation techniques with different degrees without causing (or with minor) degradation to the total network throughput.