Efficient and Fair Rate Allocation Scheme for Multi-user over Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Allocating bandwidth to multiple users sharing multiple heterogeneous access networks is an important issue in the next generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth allocation scheme named as Efficient and Fair Allocation in Rate (EFAR), which is formulated as a convex optimization problem that maximizes the utility of each user and determines how to split the total rate among the multiple access networks. Compared with the scheme that minimizes the total expected distortion of all the video streams and other schemes that only consider the system efficiency or the user fairness, the EFAR scheme considers both efficiency and fairness, and achieves a more balanced utility among all the users.