On the Throughput Characteristics of Utility-based Fair Scheduling

The proportional fair scheduling (PFS) problem is studied in the paper. PFS is considered an attractive bandwidth allocation criterion in wireless networks for supporting high resource utilization while maintaining good fairness among network flows. The most challenge of a PFS problem is the lack of an analytic expression. By rigorously mathematical derivation, we obtain a closed-form expression for the throughput of PFS in Rayleigh fading environment. The theoretical results are compared with those from simulations. The derived model is shown to provide a high accuracy in evaluating the throughput of the PFS algorithm in Rayleigh fading networks. In particular, the expression presented here will provide great help for the system design of a PFS capable network. Moreover, compared with existing analytical results on PFS, our expression is more general in that we do not require the i.i.d relationship among nodes in our derivation.