Resource allocation problem in communications networks

This chapter formulates the resource allocation problem for wireless networks. Before that, however, we briefly discuss the fundamental trade-off between efficiency and fairness in wired networks. This trade-off eventually led researchers to consider the problem of maximizing the sum of monotonically increasing and strictly concave utility functions of source rates. We review some existing solutions to this problem and explain the insufficiency of these solutions in case of wireless networks. Section 5.2 reformulates the problem to better capture the situation encountered in wireless networks. We will argue in favor of MAC layer fair policies that have already been used in wired networks as a basis to achieve end-to-end fairness. We precisely define the concept of joint power control and link scheduling as well as introduce the notion of the feasible rate region.