A Fair Opportunistic Access Scheme for Multiuser OFDM Wireless Networks

We propose a new access scheme for efficient support of multimedia services in OFDM wireless networks, both in the uplink and in the downlink. This scheme further increases the benefits of opportunistic scheduling by extending this cross-layer technique to higher layers. Access to the medium is granted based on a system of weights that dynamically accounts for both the experienced QoS and the transmission conditions. This new approach enables the full support of multimedia services with the adequate traffic and QoS differentiation while maximizing the system capacity and keeping a special attention on fairness. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed access technique outperforms existing wireless access schemes and demonstrates that choosing between high fairness and high system throughput is no more required.