  In the conventional information theoretic analysis of multiterminal
communication scenarios, it is often assumed that all of the distributed
terminals use the communication channel simultaneously. However, in practical
wireless communication systems - due to restricted computation complexity at
network terminals - a limited number of users can be activated either in uplink
or downlink simultaneously. This necessitates the design of a scheduler which
determines the set of active users at each time-slot. A well designed scheduler
maximizes the average system utility subject to a set of fairness criteria,
which must be met in a limited window-length to avoid long starvation periods.
In this work, scheduling under short-term temporal fairness constraints is
considered. The objective is to maximize the average system utility such that
the fraction of the time-slots that each user is activated is within desired
upper and lower bounds in the fairness window-length. The set of feasible
window-lengths is characterized as a function of system parameters. It is shown
that the optimal system utility is non-monotonic and super-additive in
window-length. Furthermore, a scheduling strategy is proposed which satisfies
short-term fairness constraints for arbitrary window-lengths, and achieves
optimal average system utility as the window-length is increased
asymptotically. Numerical simulations are provided to verify the results.
