A Rate Allocation Scheme for Multi-User over Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Bandwidth allocation for multi-user sharing heterogeneous wireless access networks is one of the most important problems in the next generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth allocation scheme named as Efficient and Fair Rate Allocation (EFRA), which is formulated as a convex optimization problem maximizing the user's utility as well as determining to split the total rate among multiple access networks fairly and efficiently. Compared with the scheme that minimizes the total expected distortion of all the video streams and other schemes that only consider either the system efficiency or the user fairness, the EFRA scheme considers both efficiency and fairness, and achieves utility fairness among all the users.