Achieving network wide proportional fairness: A pricing method

Proportional fairness (PF) scheduling achieves a balanced tradeoff between throughput and fairness and has attracted great attention recently. However, most previous works on PF only consider the single cell scenario. This paper focuses on the problem of achieving global PF in a generalized multiple base station multiple user network. The problem is formulated as a maximization model and solved using dual method. By decomposing the dual objective function, we get a pricing based PF algorithm. Optimality of this algorithm is presented. Although the algorithm is derived using fixed link rate assumption, it can still achieve network wide PF in the presence of time varying rates. We show that the proposed algorithm is suitable for distributed systems in the sense that it does not need any inter base station communication at all. Simulations illustrate that compared with traditional local PF scheduling, global PF scheduling achieves higher throughput, lower throughput oscillation and greater fairness.