Fairness Analysis in Cellular Networks using Stochastic Petri Nets

Cellular wireless networks based on OFDMA utilize adaptive modulation and coding to operate effectively in regions of high and low SINR. Therefore the local single antenna spectral efficiency ranges between 5 in the cell center and 0.2 b/s/Hz at the cell edge. The scheduling goal of high average spectral efficiency contradicts the goal of a good rate fairness among all terminals. Also there is a tradeoff between increasing the cell edge performance and maintaining a high average spectral efficiency. In this paper a stochastic Petri net analysis approach is taken and a numeric analysis is performed based on Markov chain equivalence and steady state calculations. The proposed models are deliberately abstract but offer commonly used tuning parameters in order to study the tradeoff without too many degrees of freedom.