An Analytical Framework for Capacity and Fairness Evaluation in High Speed Wireless Data Networks

This paper presents an analytical framework to evaluate the downlink capacity and fairness performance for high speed wireless data networks from both the physical layer and the network layer perspectives. From the physical layer standpoint, we take into account of propagation loss, log-normal shadowing and Nakagami fading. From the network layer perspective, we model different scheduling policies and the impact of nonuniform traffic intensity of mobile users into our framework. We analyze the joint effects of radio channel impairments, nonuniform traffic intensity and scheduling algorithms on the downlink capacity and fairness performance of wireless data networks based on the developed framework. Our results indicate that it is crucial for wireless scheduling algorithms to consider not only the radio channel impairments, but also the traffic intensity distribution in the whole network.