Hybrid maximum-rate and proportional-fairness resource allocation in the downlink of LTE networks

In this paper, we propose a hybrid maximum-rate (MR) and proportional-fairness (PF) resource allocation scheme in the downlink transmissions of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. When the users are low-density or have small channel diversities, the proposed scheme performs closely like a PF manner because the PF policy can provide a superior fairness performance with a modest reduction in throughput as the user average channel qualities are fairly uniform. With the growth of user densities or user channel diversities, the proposed scheme behaves like a MR fashion so as to maximize the system throughput superior to providing user fairness. The simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can balance the tradeoff between system throughput and user fairness and thus optimize the overall LTE transmission performance.