Adaptive proportional fairness for packet scheduling in HSDPA

This paper considers packet scheduling in high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) networks. One of the main features of HSDPA is the capability of tracking fast channel variations and the use of a large set of discrete rate values, which should be used to conduct fast scheduling of packets while ensuring fairness between users. We consider the operating environment where the scheduling is performed in heterogeneous channels. In this case, proportional fairness (PF) scheduling fails to achieve the goal of providing fair throughput to the users. We propose, in this paper, an approach that resolves this shortcoming. The proposed scheduling algorithm, called adaptive proportional fairness (APF) is shown to ensure proportional fairness even under different QoS requirements for users experiencing different channel conditions. Taking into consideration the system´s constraints on the available rates, simulation results and comparisons show the high efficiency of our approach compared to PF scheduling.