A Novel Scheme for Aggregate Throughput Maximization with Fairness Constraints in Cellular Networks

Maximizing the aggregate throughput of wireless cellular networks using link adaptation techniques (e.g. adaptive modulation and power control) has got a great deal of attention (e.g., [5]). However, the fairness of individual throughput allocation has not been well addressed yet. The fairness problem of link adaptation techniques has recently attracted some attention (e.g., [6, 9]) but the problem still needs deeper analysis and more efficient solutions. This paper proposes a new scheme that finds the optimal power and modulation level that maximizes the aggregate throughput while taking the individual throughput fairness into consideration. The problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem and then converted to an unconstrained optimization one by including the constraint as a penalty term in the objective function. The unconstrained optimization problem is solved using the steepest descent technique. Results show that the proposed scheme is always able to achieve the fairness requirements with high aggregate throughput.