Balanced capacity of wireline multiple access channels with individual power constraints

This paper applies the concept of balanced capacity, a fair trade-off between individual and global performance, to the uplink of a Gaussian frequency-selective multiuser channel with K users, where K can be much larger than 2. Individual power constraints are applied to each transmitter, which makes the computation of the balanced capacity very complex. The concept of 'equivalent channel' is used to derive an explicit expression of the optimal power allocation, that remains compatible with the individual power constraints. The computation of the balanced capacity is then formulated as a set of 2K nonlinear equations. An iterative algorithm providing the exact solution is firstly introduced. A suboptimal solution, based on the Iterative Multiuser Water-Filling (IMWF) algorithm, is then proposed and shown to be very close to the optimal solution. The idea of this alternative method, called 'balanced water-filling', is to modify the power allocation obtained with the IMWF algorithm in order to get balanced data rates. Results are provided for a wireline access network with 20 users.