Fair rate allocation for flows in concurrent multipath communications

In concurrent multipath communications, each source is allowed to carry packets from it to its destination over multiple concurrent paths, which improves the performance of increasingly bandwidth-hungry applications, and more importantly, promotes the transmission security and reliability. In this paper, we propose fair rate allocation model for flows in concurrent multipath communications, and give an interpretation for the utility maximization problem and its sub-problems from an economic point of view. For the model we obtain the exact expression of optimal rate allocation for each source-destination pair, and confirm that with both simulation and optimization software. In order to achieve the optimum in a decentralized architecture, we present a novel algorithm which depends only on local information. Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm can achieve the optimum within reasonable convergence times.