General Weighted Fairness and its support in Deficit Round Robin with Fragmentation in IEEE 802.16 WiMAX

In wireless networks, the definition of fair resource allocation is ambiguous primarily because the wireless channel condition is not constant over time and distance. Two main ways to define fair resource allocation are: by number of allocated slots, i.e., temporalfainess, or the number of transmitted bytes, throughput-fairness. In wireless broadband networks, the quality of services level is associated with the price paid. The throughput fairness is favorable to customers with a poor channel condition or those at a far distance. Slot fairness will be preferred by the customers near the base stations and with good channel. In this paper, we a generalized weighted fairness (GWF) criterion that allows carriers to implement either of the two fairness criterion. Numerical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effect of GWF. Moreover, we investigate three switch algorithms for GWF: simple switch (imitating the general processor sharing GPS), deficit round robin (DRR), and deficit round robin with fragmentation (DRRF). The results show that the switch algorithms can achieve GWF. Among the three schemes, DRRF achieves the highest throughput with the least overhead.