Proportionally Fair Distributed Resource Allocation in Multiband Wireless Systems

A challenging problem in multiband multicell self-organized wireless systems, such as femtocells/picocells in cellular networks, multichannel Wi-Fi networks, and more recent wireless networks over TV white spaces, is of distributed resource allocation. This in general involves four components: channel selection, client association, channel access, and client scheduling. In this paper, we present a unified framework for jointly addressing the four components with the global system objective of maximizing the clients throughput in a proportionally fair manner. Our formulation allows a natural dissociation of the problem into two subparts. We show that the first part, involving channel access and client scheduling, is convex and derive a distributed adaptation procedure for achieving a Pareto-optimal solution. For the second part, involving channel selection and client association, we develop a Gibbs-sampler-based approach for local adaptation to achieve the global objective, as well as derive fast greedy algorithms from it that achieve good solutions often.