High Speed Railway Wireless Communications: Efficiency v.s. Fairness

Abstract: High speed railways (HSRs) have been deployed widely all over the world in recent years. Different from traditional cellular communication, its high mobility makes it essential to implement power allocation along the time. In the HSR case, the transmission rate depends greatly 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 power allocation will spend all the power when the train is nearest from the BS, which will cause great unfairness along the time. On the other hand, the channel inversion allocation achieves the best fairness in terms of constant rate transmission. However, its power efficiency is much lower. Therefore, the power efficiency and the fairness along time are two incompatible objects. For the HSR cellular system considered in this paper, a trade-off between the two is achieved by proposing a temporal proportional fair power allocation scheme. Besides, near optimal closed form solution and one algorithm finding the $\epsilon$-optimal allocation are presented.