A new metric of system resource utilization for WCDMA systems

We suggest a new measure for the system resource consumed in each transmission so as to improve the overall performance of WCDMA systems. In existing discussions of resource allocation for WCDMA, they only consider "time slots" or "transmission rates", but ignore "power", a valuable resource in WCDMA systems. In WCDMA, the total power level of all users needs to be maintained under a certain threshold. However, a higher transmission rate needs a higher power level. This conflict between the transmission rate and the power level renders existing resource allocation schemes inadequate. In this paper, we define a new metric to capture the system resource consumed in one transmission and propose a credit-based fair scheduling mechanism based on the defined new metric. We verify this definition with some existing adaptation schemes and also provide simulation results to show the fairness among multiple users using the proposed credit-based fair scheduling mechanism.