Performance versus Fairness in Multi User Wireless Communications

Performance and fairness optimization is an ever challenging issue that leads academics from all over the world toward the research of the optimal tradeoff in several fields, such as economic, computer science, and wireless communications. In this work we focus on one of the most important problems in networking to propose a novel and general framework for the analytical formulation of the optimal tradeoff between performance and fairness that can be applied to a wide class of networking problems Specifically, we adopt a general definition of performance and fairness, that can be used in most tradeoff problems. The solution is given in terms of a simple system of equations that can be numerically solved. Example results are provided for two case studies, respectively concerning linear and logarithmic relationships between the resources allocated to the user and its perceived performance.