This is Part I of a two-part paper series that studies the use of the proportional fairness (PF) utility function as the basis for capacity allocation and scheduling in multi-channel multi-rate wireless networks. The contributions of Part I are threefold. (i) First, we lay down the theoretical foundation for PF. Specifically, we present the fundamental properties and physical/economic interpretation of PF. We show by general mathematical arguments that PF leads to equal airtime allocation to users for the single-channel case; and equal equivalent airtime allocation to users for the multi-channel case, where the equivalent airtime enjoyed by a user is a weighted sum of the airtimes enjoyed by the user on all channels, with the weight of a channel being the price or value of that channel. We also establish the Pareto efficiency of PF solutions. (ii) Second, we derive characteristics of PF solutions that are useful for the construction of PF-optimization algorithms. We present several PF-optimization algorithms, including a fast algorithm that is amenable to parallel implementation. (iii) Third, we study the use of PF utility for capacity allocation in large-scale WiFi networks consisting of many adjacent wireless LANs. We find that the PF solution simultaneously achieves higher system throughput, better fairness, and lower outage probability with respect to the default solution given by today's 802.11 commercial products. Part II of this paper series extends our investigation to the time-varying-channel case in which the data rates enjoyed by users over the channels vary dynamically over time
This is Part II of a two-part paper series that studies the use of the proportional fairness (PF) utility function as the basis for capacity allocation and scheduling in multi-channel multi-rate wireless networks. The contributions of Part II are twofold. (i) First, we extend the problem formulation, theoretical results, and algorithms to the case of time-varying channels, where opportunistic capacity allocation and scheduling can be exploited to improve system performance. We lay down the theoretical foundation for optimization that "couples" the time-varying characteristic of channels with t…
The near-far problem causes severe throughput unfairness in wireless powered communication networks (WPCN). In this paper, we exploit non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology and propose a fairness-aware NOMA-based scheduling scheme to mitigate the near-far effect and to enhance the max-min fairness. Specifically, we sort all users according to their channel conditions and divide them into two groups, the interference group with high channel gains and the noninterference group with low channel gains. The power station (PS) concurrently transmits energy signals with the data transmissio…
We integrate a wireless powered communication network with a cooperative cognitive radio network, where multiple secondary users (SUs) powered wirelessly by a hybrid access point (HAP) help a primary user relay the data. As a reward for the cooperation, the secondary network gains the spectrum access where SUs transmit to HAP using time division multiple access. To maximize the sum-throughput of SUs, we present a secondary sum-throughput optimal resource allocation (STORA) scheme. Under the constraint of meeting target primary rate, the STORA scheme chooses the optimal set of relaying SUs and …
The performance of cluster computing depends on how concurrent jobs share multiple data center resource types like CPU, RAM and disk storage. Recent research has discussed efficiency and fairness requirements and identified a number of desirable scheduling objectives including so-called dominant resource fairness (DRF). We argue here that proportional fairness (PF), long recognized as a desirable objective in sharing network bandwidth between ongoing flows, is preferable to DRF. The superiority of PF is manifest under the realistic modelling assumption that the population of jobs in progress i…
This paper considers proportional fairness amongst ACs in an EDCA WLAN for provision of distinct QoS requirements and priority parameters. A detailed theoretical analysis is provided to derive the optimal station attempt probability which leads to a proportional fair allocation of station throughputs. The desirable fairness can be achieved using a centralised adaptive control approach. This approach is based on multivariable statespace control theory and uses the Linear Quadratic Integral (LQI) controller to periodically update CWmin till the optimal fair point of operation. Performance evalua…
This letter proposes a control theoretic approach to achieve proportional fairness amongst access categories (ACs) in an error-prone EDCA WLAN for provision of distinct QoS requirements and priority parameters. The approach adaptively adjusts the minimum contention window of each AC to derive the station attempt probability to its optimum which leads to a proportional fair allocation of station throughputs. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed control approach has high accuracy performance and fast convergence speed for general network scenarios.
Proportional Fair (PF) is a scheduling technique to maintain a balance between maximizing throughput and ensuring fairness to users. Dual Connectivity (DC) technique was introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to improve the mobility robustness and system capacity in heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of DC in improving proportional fairness in the system. We propose a low complexity centralized PF scheduling scheme for DC and show that it outperforms the standard PF scheduling scheme. Since the problem of dual association of users for maximiz…
This paper studies a novel user cooperation method in a wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where a pair of distributed terminal users first harvest wireless energy broadcasted by one energy node (EN) and then use the harvested energy to transmit information cooperatively to a destination node (DN). In particular, the two cooperating users exchange their independent information with each other to form a virtual antenna array and transmit jointly to the DN. By allowing each user to allocate part of its harvested energy to transmit the other's information, the proposed cooperation can…
This paper considers the deployment of a hybrid wireless data/power access point in an 802.11-based wireless powered IoT network. The proportionally fair allocation of throughputs across IoT nodes is considered under the constraints of energy neutrality and CPU capability for each device. The joint optimization of wireless powering and data communication resources takes the CSMA/CA random channel access features, e.g. the backoff procedure, collisions, protocol overhead into account. Numerical results show that the optimized solution can effectively balance individual throughput across nodes, …
This paper presents a radio resource block allocation optimization problem for cellular communications systems with users running delay-tolerant and real-time applications, generating elastic and inelastic traffic on the network and being modelled as logarithmic and sigmoidal utilities respectively. The optimization is cast under a utility proportional fairness framework aiming at maximizing the cellular systems utility whilst allocating users the resource blocks with an eye on application quality of service requirements and on the procedural temporal and computational efficiency. Ultimately, …
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）
This paper investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless powered mobile-edge computing (MEC) system, where the UAV powers the mobile terminals by wireless power transfer (WPT) and provides computation service for them. We aim to maximize the computation rate of terminals while ensuring fairness among them. Considering the random trajectories of mobile terminals, we propose a soft actor-critic (SAC)-based UAV trajectory planning and resource allocation (SAC-TR) algorithm, which combines off-policy and maximum entropy reinforcement learning to promote the convergence of the alg…
Community Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) is a paradigm in wireless communication of 21st centuary as means of providing high speed braodband access. Un-cooperative nodes, both selfish and malicious proves to be a significant threat in Community WMN that require a solution independent of routing protocols being used. We propose to implement Modified PIFA (MPIFA), an Improved version of Protocol Independent Fairness Algorithm (PIFA) proposed by Younghwan Yoo, Sanghyun and P. Agrawal [6] with ability to cater specific requirements in Community WMN. MPIFA has malicious nodes detection rate improveme…
In this paper, Long-Term Proportional Fair (LTPF) resource allocation algorithm in dynamic OFDMA system is presented, which provides long-term QoS guarantee (mainly throughput requirement satisfaction) to individual user and follows every user's QoS profile at long-term by incremental optimization of proportional fairness and overall system rate maximization. The LTPF algorithm dynamically allocates the OFDMA sub-carriers to the users in such a way that in long-term the individual QoS requirement is achieved as well as fairness among the users is maintained even in a heterogeneous traffic cond…
Node cooperation during packet forwarding operations is critically important for fair resource utilization in Community Wireless Mesh Networks (CoWMNs). In a CoWMN, node cooperation is achieved by using fairness protocols specifically designed to detect and isolate malicious nodes, discourage unfair behavior, and encourage node participation in forwarding packets. In general, these protocols can be split into two groups: Incentive-based ones, which are managed centrally, and use credit allocation schemes. In contrast, reputation-based protocols that are decentralized, and rely on information e…
This paper presents a modified proportional fairness (PF) criterion suitable for mitigating the \textit{rate anomaly} problem of multirate IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs employing the mandatory Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) option. Compared to the widely adopted assumption of saturated network, the proposed criterion can be applied to general networks whereby the contending stations are characterized by specific packet arrival rates, $λ_s$, and transmission rates $R_d^{s}$. The throughput allocation resulting from the proposed algorithm is able to greatly increase the aggregate throughput…
We consider multi--hop wireless networks carrying unicast flows for multiple users. Each flow has a specified delay deadline, and the lossy wireless links are modelled as binary symmetric channels (BSCs). Since transmission time, also called airtime, on the links is shared amongst flows, increasing the airtime for one flow comes at the cost of reducing the airtime available to other flows sharing the same link. We derive the joint allocation of flow airtimes and coding rates that achieves the proportionally fair throughput allocation. This utility optimisation problem is non--convex, and one o…
Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol introduced in IEEE802.15.4e standard, addressing low power requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Lossy Networks (LLNs). The 6TiSCH Operation sublayer (6top) of IEEE802.15.4e defines the schedule that includes sleep, transmit and receive routines of the nodes. However, the design of schedule is not specified by the standard. In this paper, we propose a contention based proportional fairness (CBPF) transmission scheme for TSCH networks to maximize the system throughput addressing fair allocation of…
Multi-access networks may exhibit severe unfairness in throughput. Recent studies show that this unfairness is due to local differences in the neighborhood structure: Nodes with less neighbors receive better access. We study the unfairness in saturated linear networks, and adapt the multi-access CSMA protocol to remove the unfairness completely, by choosing the activation rates of nodes appropriately as a function of the number of neighbors. We then investigate the consequences of this choice of activation rates on the network-average saturated throughput, and we show that these rates perform …
Spectrum sharing is an elegant solution to addressing the scarcity of the bandwidth for wireless communications systems. This research studies the feasibility of sharing the spectrum between sectorized cellular systems and stationary radars interfering with certain sectors of the communications infrastructure. It also explores allocating optimal resources to mobile devices in order to provide with the quality of service for all running applications whilst growing the communications network spectrally coexistent with the radar systems. The rate allocation problem is formulated as two convex opt…
This paper presents a modified proportional fairness (PF) criterion suitable for mitigating the \textit{rate anomaly} problem of multirate IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs employing the mandatory Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) option. Compared to the widely adopted assumption of saturated network, the proposed criterion can be applied to general networks whereby the contending stations are characterized by specific packet arrival rates, $λ_s$, and transmission rates $R_d^{s}$. The throughput allocation resulting from the proposed algorithm is able to greatly increase the aggregate throughput…
A challenging problem in multi-band multi-cell self-organized wireless systems, such as multi-channel Wi-Fi networks, femto/pico cells in 3G/4G cellular networks, and more recent wireless networks over TV white spaces, is of distributed resource allocation. This involves four components: channel selection, client association, channel access, and client scheduling. In this paper, we present a unified framework for jointly addressing the four components with the global system objective of maximizing the clients throughput in a proportionally fair manner. Our formulation allows a natural dissocia…
Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as a scalable, reliable, and agile wireless network that supports many types of innovative technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular networks. Due to the limited number of orthogonal channels, interference between channels adversely affects the fair distribution of bandwidth among mesh clients, causing node starvation in terms of insufficient bandwidth, which impedes the adoption of WMN as an efficient access technology. Therefore, a fair channel assignment is crucial for the mesh clients to utilize the …
Digital twins have shown a great potential in supporting the development of wireless networks. They are virtual representations of 5G/6G systems enabling the design of machine learning and optimization-based techniques. Field data replication is one of the critical aspects of building a simulation-based twin, where the objective is to calibrate the simulation to match field performance measurements. Since wireless networks involve a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs), the replication process becomes a multi-objective optimization problem in which the purpose is to minimize the error …
This paper focuses on multirate IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN employing the mandatory Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) option. Its aim is threefold. Upon starting from the multi-dimensional Markovian state transition model proposed by Malone \textit{et.al.} for characterizing the behavior of the IEEE 802.11 protocol at the Medium Access Control layer, it presents an extension accounting for packet transmission failures due to channel errors. Second, it establishes the conditions under which a network constituted by $N$ stations, each station transmitting with its own bit rate, $R^{(s)}_d$, a…
In this document we study the application of weighted proportional fairness to data flows in the Internet. We let the users set the weights of their connections in order to maximise the utility they get from the network. When combined with a pricing scheme where connections are billed by weight and time, such a system is known to maximise the total utility of the network. Our study case is a national Web cache server connected to long distance links. We propose two ways of weighting TCP connections by manipulating some parameters of the protocol and present results from simulations and prototy…
Wireless LANs have achieved a tremendous amount of growth in recent years. Among various wireless LAN technologies, the IEEE 802.11b based wireless LAN technology can be cited as the most prominent technology today. Despite being widely deployed, 802.11b cannot be termed as a well matured technology. Although 802.11b is adequate for basic connectivity and packet switching, It is evident that there is ample scope for its improvement in areas like quality of service, fairness, performance, security, etc. In this survey report, we identify and argue that the Medium Access Controller for 802.11b n…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) will play a significant role as a 5G candidate in facing the growing demand of enormous data rate in the near future. The conventional mmWave standard, IEEE 802.11ad, considers establishing only one mmWave link in wireless local area network (WLAN) to provide multi Gbps data rate. But, mmWave has a tenuous channel which hinders it from providing such rate. Hence, it's necessary to establish multiple mmWave links simultaneously by deploying a multiple number of mmWave access points (APs) in 5G networks. Unfortunately, applying conventional standard without any modificat…
Traffic load balancing and resource allocation is set to play a crucial role in leveraging the dense and increasingly heterogeneous deployment of multi-radio wireless networks. Traffic aggregation across different access points (APs)/radio access technologies (RATs) has become an important feature of recently introduced cellular standards on LTE dual connectivity and LTE-WLAN aggregation (LWA). Low complexity traffic splitting solutions for scenarios where the APs are not necessarily collocated are of great interest for operators. In this paper, we consider a scenario, where traffic for each u…
In the current intensively changing technological environment, wireless network operators try to manage the increase of global traffic, optimizing the use of the available resources. This involves associating each user to one of its reachable wireless networks; a decision that can be made on the user side, in which case inefficiencies stem from user selfishness. This paper aims at correcting that efficiency loss through the use of a one-dimensional incentive signal, interpreted as a price. While the so-called Pigovian taxes allow to deal with homogeneous users, we consider here two classes wit…
Imposing fairness in resource allocation incurs a loss of system throughput, known as the Price of Fairness ($PoF$). In wireless scheduling, $PoF$ increases when serving users with very poor channel quality because the scheduler wastes resources trying to be fair. This paper proposes a novel resource allocation framework to rigorously address this issue. We introduce selective fairness: being fair only to selected users, and improving $PoF$ by momentarily blocking the rest. We study the associated admission control problem of finding the user selection that minimizes $PoF$ subject to selective…
This work aims at combining adaptive protocol design, utility maximization and stochastic geometry. We focus on a spatial adaptation of Aloha within the framework of ad hoc networks. We consider quasi-static networks in which mobiles learn the local topology and incorporate this information to adapt their medium access probability (MAP) selection to their local environment. We consider the cases where nodes cooperate in a distributed way to maximize the global throughput or to achieve either proportional fair or max-min fair medium access. In the proportional fair case, we show that nodes can …
This paper investigates the system spectral efficiency (SE) in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, where RIS can reconfigure the propagation environment via a large number of controllable and intelligent phase shifters. In order to explore the system SE performance behavior with user proportional fairness for such a system, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the SE by jointly considering the power allocation at the base station (BS) and phase shift at the RIS, under nonlinear proportional rate fairness constraints…
Designing efficient and fair algorithms for sharing multiple resources between heterogeneous demands is becoming increasingly important. Applications include compute clusters shared by multi-task jobs and routers equipped with middleboxes shared by flows of different types. We show that the currently preferred objective of Dominant Resource Fairness has a significantly less favorable efficiency-fairness tradeoff than alternatives like Proportional Fairness and our proposal, Bottleneck Max Fairness. In addition to other desirable properties, these objectives are equally strategyproof in any rea…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has recently attracted significant attention from both industrial and academic communities. The large bandwidth availability as well as low interference nature of mmWave spectrum is particularly attractive for industrial communication. However, inherent challenges such as coverage and blockage of mmWave communication cause highly fluctuated channel quality. This paper explores wireless medium access control (MAC) schedulers for mmWave-based industrial wireless applications. Our objective is to design a high-performance and enhanced fairness MAC scheduling…
The fairness of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks (including Wireless LAN and Ad-hoc networks) is hard to predict and control because of the randomness and complexity of the MAC contentions and dynamics. Moreover, asymmetric channel conditions such as those caused by capture and channel errors often lead to severe unfairness among stations. In this paper we propose a novel distributed scheduling algorithm that we call VLS, for ``{\em variable-length scheduling}'', that provides weighted fairness to all stations despite the imperfections of the MAC layer and physical channels. Distinct features of …
Optimization of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) downlink with an energy harvesting transmitter (base station) is considered. The base station (BS), which is attached to the central controller of the network, sends control information to the gateways of individual WSNs in the downlink. This paper specifically addresses the case where the BS is supplied with solar energy. Leveraging the daily periodicity inherent in solar energy harvesting, the schedule for delivery of maintenance messages from the BS to the nodes of a distributed network is optimized. Differences in channel gain from the BS to …
In this paper, we consider a secondary wireless powered communication network (WPCN) underlaid to a primary point-to-point communication link. The WPCN consists of a multi-antenna hybrid access point (HAP) that transfers wireless energy to a cluster of low-power wireless devices (WDs) and receives sensing data from them. To tackle the inherent severe user unfairness problem in WPCN, we consider a cluster-based cooperation where a WD acts as the cluster head that relays the information of the other WDs. Besides, we apply energy beamforming technique to balance the dissimilar energy consumptions…
We consider two elementary (max-flow and uniform-flow) and two realistic (max-min fairness and proportional fairness) congestion control schemes, and analyse how the algorithms and network structure affect throughput, the fairness of flow allocation, and the location of bottleneck edges. The more realistic proportional fairness and max-min fairness algorithms have similar throughput, but path flow allocations are more unequal in scale-free than in random regular networks. Scale-free networks have lower throughput than their random regular counterparts in the uniform-flow algorithm, which is fa…
In this paper we build upon the recent observation that the 802.11 rate region is log-convex and, for the first time, characterise max-min fair rate allocations for a large class of 802.11 wireless mesh networks. By exploiting features of the 802.11e/n MAC, in particular TXOP packet bursting, we are able to use this characterisation to establish a straightforward, practically implementable approach for achieving max-min throughput fairness. We demonstrate that this approach can be readily extended to encompass time-based fairness in multi-rate 802.11 mesh networks.
This paper proposes a fair and efficient QoS scheduling scheme for IEEE 802.16 BWA systems that satisfies both throughput and delay guarantee to various real and non-real time applications. The proposed QoS scheduling scheme is compared with an existing QoS scheduling scheme proposed in literature in recent past. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling scheme can provide a tight QoS guarantee in terms of delay, delay violation rate and throughput for all types of traffic as defined in the WiMAX standard, thereby maintaining the fairness and helps to eliminate starvation of lower p…
In this paper, we consider fair privacy in a shared network subject to traffic analysis attacks by an eavesdropper. We initiate the study of the joint trade-off between privacy, throughput and delay in such a shared network as a utility fairness problem and derive the proportional fair rate allocation for networks of flows subject to privacy constraints and delay deadlines.
This paper investigates the adaptive subcarrier and bit allocation algorithm for OFDMA systems. To minimize overall transmitted power, we propose a novel adaptive subcarrier and bit allocation algorithm based on channel state information (CSI) and quality state information (QSI). A suboptimal approach that separately performs subcarrier allocation and bit loading is proposed. It is shown that a near optimal solution is obtained by the proposed algorithm which has low complexity compared to that of other conventional algorithm. We will study the problem of finding an optimal sub-carrier and pow…
We investigate the problem of network utility maximization in multiple gateways wireless mesh networks by considering Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) as the interference model. The aim is a cross layer design that considers joint rate control, traffic splitting, routing, scheduling, link rate allocation and power control to formulate the network utility maximization problem. As this problem is computationally complex, we propose the Joint dynamic Gateway selection, link Rate allocation and Power control (JGRP) algorithm based on the differential backlog as a sub-optimal solution…
This paper studies a federated learning (FL) system, where \textit{multiple} FL services co-exist in a wireless network and share common wireless resources. It fills the void of wireless resource allocation for multiple simultaneous FL services in the existing literature. Our method designs a two-level resource allocation framework comprising \emph{intra-service} resource allocation and \emph{inter-service} resource allocation. The intra-service resource allocation problem aims to minimize the length of FL rounds by optimizing the bandwidth allocation among the clients of each FL service. Base…
In this paper, we evaluate M-DWARF performance by experimentation and simulation. We validate its functionalities on TelosB motes and compare its performance with EXT-DESYNC, and LIGHTWEIGHT on TOSSIM. On simulation, we test the algorithms on several multihop topologies and discuss both the average and problematic cases. In addition, we investigate the impacts of period length (T) and compare channel utilization fairness among the desynchronization algorithms. Finally, we propose a method to reduce desynchronization overhead. (This paper is the second part of the series Stable Desynchronizatio…
In this work we propose an efficient resource allocation algorithm for OFDMA based wireless systems supporting heterogeneous traffic. The proposed algorithm provides proportionally fairness to data users and short term rate guarantees to real-time users. Based on the QoS requirements, buffer occupancy and channel conditions, we propose a scheme for rate requirement determination for delay constrained sessions. Then we formulate and solve the proportional fair rate allocation problem subject to those rate requirements and power/bandwidth constraints. Simulations results show that the proposed a…
This paper investigates a new class of carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols that employ deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques, referred to as carrier-sense deep-reinforcement learning multiple access (CS-DLMA). The goal of CS-DLMA is to enable efficient and equitable spectrum sharing among a group of co-located heterogeneous wireless networks. Existing CSMA protocols, such as the medium access control (MAC) of WiFi, are designed for a homogeneous network in which all nodes adopt the same protocol. Such protocols suffer from severe performance degradation in a heterogeneous env…
In this paper, we consider a wireless powered communication network (WPCN) consisting of a multi-antenna hybrid access point (HAP) that transfers wireless energy to and receives sensing data from a cluster of low-power wireless devices (WDs). To enhance the throughput performance of some far-away WDs, we allow one of the WDs to act as the cluster head (CH) that helps forward the messages of the other cluster members (CMs). However, the performance of the proposed cluster-based cooperation is fundamentally limited by the high energy consumption of the CH, who needs to transmit all the WDs' mess…
