High-Speed Railway Wireless Communications: Efficiency Versus Fairness

High-speed railways (HSRs) have been widely deployed all over the world in recent years. Different from traditional cellular communications, the high mobility of HSR communication makes it essential to implement power allocation (PA) along time. In the HSR case, the transmission rate greatly depends on the distance between the base station (BS) and the train. As a result, the train receives a time-varying data rate service when passing by a BS. It is clear that the most efficient PA will spend all the power when the train is nearest the BS, which will cause great unfairness along time. On the other hand, channel inversion allocation achieves the best fairness in terms of constant rate transmission. However, its power efficiency is much lower. Therefore, power efficiency and fairness along time are two incompatible objects. For the HSR cellular system considered in this paper, a tradeoff between the two is achieved by proposing a temporal proportional-fair PA scheme. In addition, a near-optimal closed-form solution and one algorithm finding epsilon-optimal allocation are presented.