Tie-breaking can maximize fairness without sacrificing throughput in D2D-assisted networks

Opportunistic schedulers such as MaxRate and Proportional Fair are known for trading off between throughput and fairness of users in cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that integrates opportunistic scheduling design principles and cooperative D2D communication capabilities in order to maximize fairness without sacrificing throughput. Specifically, we develop a mathematical approach and design a smart tie-breaking scheme which maximizes the fairness achieved by the MaxRate scheduler. However, our approach could be applied to improve fairness of any scheduler. In addition, we show that users that cooperatively form D2D clusters benefit from both higher throughput and fairness. Our scheduling scheme is simple to implement, scales linearly with the number of clusters, and is able to double the throughput of Equal Time schedulers and to outperform by 20% or more Proportional Fair schedulers, while providing a user fairness index comparable to or better than Proportional Fair.