Game-theoretic rate allocation with balanced traffic in collaborative transmission over heterogeneous wireless access networks

To balance the traffic in high-speed collaborative transmission, the static rate allocation problem over heterogeneous wireless access networks is formulated in a weighted bargaining game framework, where the heterogeneity of transmission capability of different networks is taken into account. The weights in the framework, which are used to describe the bargaining power of the bargaining game, are determined by the available bit rates of different networks. With the maximised throughput gain as the optimal objective, the closed form of the Nash bargaining solution is derived with the Lagrange multipliers method. Simulation results demonstrate that the presented framework is more efficient with completely balanced traffic so as to make full use of the heterogeneous network resource and prevent network saturation as much as possible.