Proportional fair is a compromise-based scheduling algorithm. It is based upon maintaining a balance between two competing interests: Trying to maximize total [wired/wireless network] throughput while at the same time allowing all users at least a minimal level of service. This is done by assigning each data flow a data rate or a scheduling priority (depending on the implementation) that is inversely proportional to its anticipated resource consumption.
Proportionally fair scheduling can be achieved by means of weighted fair queuing (WFQ), by setting the scheduling weights for data flow to , where the cost is the amount of consumed resources per data bit. For instance: