A Fairness Model for Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

In wireless networks many nodes contend for available resources creating a challenge in resource allocation. With shared resources, fairness in allocation is a serious issue. Fairness metrics have been defined to measure the fairness level of resource decisions in allocations. Therefore, fairness metrics significantly influence network and node performances emphasizing the need for due diligence to fairness metrics. It can be seen that fairness metrics in many of the allocation strategies and algorithms in the literature are not analyzed in depth to show the overall fairness of allocations from different perspectives. Hence, we propose a series of fairness metrics for resource allocation in wireless networks, which evaluate individual, system, short and long term fairness. Our metrics are general enough to be adapted in either multiple or single resource sharing scenarios. Algorithms using these metrics for channel allocation problem in peer-to-peer wireless regional area network is proposed and simulated, and the results show that our metrics in conjunction with smart channel allocation strategies guarantee both the fairness and performances.