Distributed wireless information flow allocation in multiple access networks | Lin and Lok EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2011 2011 14 EURASIP Journal on . http content 2011 1 14 Wireless Communications and Networking a SpringerOpen Journal RESEARCH Open Access Distributed wireless information flow allocation in multiple access networks Xingqin Lin and Tat Ming Lok Abstract We present a general framework for distributed wireless information flow allocation problem in multiple access networks where the end users EUs can seek wireless flows from multiple access points APs . We aim to minimize the power consumption while satisfying each EU s minimum data rate requirement but not violating peak power constraint of each AP and interference constraint monitored by regulatory agents. Toward this end we model the flow allocation problem as a game which is proved to be a best-response potential game. Then based on potential game theory we show the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium in the formulated game. Moreover we demonstrate that the Nash equilibrium is actually the globally optimal solution to our problem. Besides we propose two distributed algorithms along with convergence analysis for the network to obtain the Nash equilibrium. Meanwhile we reveal the interesting layered structure of the problem in question. Extensive numerical results are conducted to demonstrate the benefits obtained by flow allocation as well as the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. Introduction During the past two decades we have witnessed an ever increasing demand of high data rate services in wireless communications. An end user EU is normally just associated with one access point AP in today s wireless networks such as Wireless Local Area Networks WLANs to access the Internet. However researchers realize that the performance of this classic scheme may be unsatisfactory to meet the demand of high data rate services from EUs. Besides this single-AP based scheme may be prone to suffer from fading due to .
