Generalised proportional fairness scheduler for broadband orthogonal frequency-division multiple access systems with heterogeneous traffics

The popular proportional fairness (PF) scheduler is very suitable for achieving a trade-off between system throughput and fairness, but the authors observed two issues while applying it to broadband networks with heterogeneous traffics. As the PF scheduler only considers average throughput and channel quality, it favours users with low-data rates. In addition, the credits of idle users accumulate because their average throughputs decrease with time during their idle periods. This study proposes a generalised PF scheduler that considers profit instead of average throughput, and it integrates a new mechanism for updating the utility functions to mitigate the issue of credit accumulation. Simulation results show that the proposed PF scheduler outperforms the traditional algorithms in terms of fairness and transient behaviour.