Capacity, Fairness, and QoS Trade-Offs in Wireless Networks with Applications to LTE

Wireless mobile network optimization is a complex task that consists in achieving different design objectives such as spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, fairness, and quality of service. Radio resource allocation is responsible for managing the available resources in the radio access interface and, therefore, is an important tool for optimizing networks and achieving the designed objectives mentioned previously. However, in general all these network design objectives cannot be achieved at the same time by resource allocation strategies. In fact, different resource allocation strategies can be designed to maximize one objective in detriment of the other as well as to balance the objectives. In this chapter we deal with important trade-offs between contradicting objectives in modern wireless mobile networks: capacity versus fairness and capacity versus satisfaction. We present resource allocation strategies that can achieve static and adaptive performances when the previously mentioned trade-offs are considered. In order to design the resource allocation strategies we consider heuristics and utility-based solutions. System-level simulations show that the proposed techniques are powerful tools to the network operator, since they can decide in which trade-off point of the capacity-fairness or capacity-satisfaction planes they want to operate the system.