Fairness Measure - Fairly Shared Spectrum Efficiency

Fairly Shared Spectrum Efficiency

In packet radio wireless networks, The fairly shared spectrum efficiency (FSSE) can be used as a combined measure of fairness and system spectrum efficiency. The system spectral efficiency is the aggregate throughput in the network divided by the utilized radio bandwidth in hertz. The FSSE is the portion of the system spectral efficiency that is shared equally among all active users (with at least one backlogged data packet in queue or under transmission). In case of scheduling starvation, the FSSE would be zero during certain time intervals. In case of equally shared resources, the FSSE would be equal to the system spectrum efficiency. To achieve max-min fairness, the FSSE should be maximized.

FSSE is useful especially when analyzing advanced radio resource management (RRM) schemes, for example channel adaptive scheduling, for cellular networks with best-effort packet data service. In such system it may be tempting to optimize the spectrum efficiency (i.e. the throughput). However, that might result in scheduling starvation of "expensive" users at far distance from the access point, whenever another active user is closer to the same or an adjacent access point. Thus the users would experience unstable service, perhaps resulting in a reduced number of happy customers. Optimizing the FSSE results in a compromise between fairness (especially avoiding scheduling starvation) and achieving high spectral efficiency.

If the cost of each user is known, in terms of consumed resources per transferred information bit, the FSSE measure may be redefined to reflect proportional fairness. In a proportional fair system, this "proportionally fair shared spectrum efficiency" (or "fairly shared radio resource cost") is maximized. This policy is less fair since "expensive" users are given lower throughput than others, but still scheduling starvation is avoided.