Fairness-Aware Resource Scheduling in C-OFDMA Enabled Centralized Wi-Fi Access Networks

Abstract

Coordinated orthogonal frequency division multiple access (C-OFDMA) and centralized Wi-Fi access network (C-WAN) are two promising techniques for next generation Wi-Fi networks. While C-WAN enables centralized multi-access point coordination and C-OFDMA improves spectrum reuse through resource unit (RU) sharing, fairness-aware resource scheduling for C-OFDMA-enabled C-WAN remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper proposes a C-OFDMA-enabled C-WAN framework that allows multiple APs to cooperatively share spectrum resources under centralized control. Based on the proposed framework, we formulate uplink resource allocation as a global max-min fairness optimization problem under inter-BSS interference constraints. A two-stage mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is first derived to provide the optimal fairness benchmark. To efficiently solve the problem in practical networks, a heuristic fairness-aware resource scheduling (FARS) algorithm based on simulated annealing is further developed to explore interference-aware station groupings and perform RU allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that FARS achieves near-optimal fairness performance compared with the MILP benchmark while significantly reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, FARS consistently outperforms both uplink OFDMA random access and existing max-throughput C-OFDMA schemes in terms of worst-user throughput and fairness indices across different deployment scenarios.