The weighted proportional fair scheduler

To this day, traffic in cellular networks is still mainly real-time. However, with the deployment of new technologies, such as HDR (High Date Rate) and HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), this situation is bound to evolve rapidly and elastic traffic will significantly increase. These novel technologies implement opportunistic scheduling, taking advantage of the delay-tolerance of elastic traffic, to augment the global capacity of the system. Previous work has shown that "Proportional Fair" (PF) is an opportunistic scheduler that provides a good compromise between fairness and efficiency. Nevertheless, the hypotheses according to which these results are obtained are not always valid in real environments. In this paper, we propose a modified version of PF that not only introduces flexibility in sharing resources between active users but also allows for a fair allocation of resources in realistic environments.