Low complexity fair queueing driven wireless multiuser scheduler

Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and opportunistic scheduling are widely used in modern broadband wireless communication systems to adapt to time-dependent user-dependent channel fading. On one hand, AMC and opportunistic scheduling can adapt to channel variations and take advantage of multiuser diversity to effectively improve throughput. On the other hand, due to the user-dependent wireless channel conditions, opportunistic scheduling may be sacrifice short term throughput fairness among users and may introduce large packet delivery delay. Both may result in unacceptable quality-of-experience for delay sensitive traffic such as video teleconferencing. To overcome this drawback in opportunistic scheduling, we propose fair queueing driven multiuser scheduling (FQ-MS) for wireless communication systems. FQ-MS directly resorts to data structure, rather than iterative numerical optimization techniques to guarantee strict short term fairness and acceptable delay. It is indeed a synergy of fair queueing and opportunistic scheduling. Its fair queueing mode enforces deterministic short term fairness while its opportunistic scheduling mode explores stochastic multiuser diversity. FQ-MS is able to guarantee: 1) both short term and long term fairness; 2) high throughput; 3) computational efficiency. Theoretical analysis and simulation results are presented to verify that FQ-MS fulfills these desired features.