Utility Maximization for Delay Constrained QoS in Wireless

This paper studies the problem of utility maximization for clients with delay based QoS requirements in wireless networks. We adopt a model used in a previous work that characterizes the QoS requirements of clients by their delay constraints, channel reliabilities, and timely throughput requirements. In this work, we assume that the utility of a client is a function of the timely throughput it obtains. We treat the timely throughput for a client as a tunable parameter by the access point (AP), instead of a given value as in the previous work. We then study how the AP should assign timely throughputs to clients so that the total utility of all clients is maximized. We apply the techniques introduced in two previous papers to decompose the utility maximization problem into two simpler problems, a CLIENT problem and an ACCESS-POINT problem. We show that this decomposition actually describes a bidding game, where clients bid for the service time from the AP. We prove that although all clients behave selfishly in this game, the resulting equilibrium point of the game maximizes the total utility. In addition, we also establish an efficient scheduling policy for the AP to reach the optimal point of the ACCESS-POINT problem. We prove that the policy not only approaches the optimal point but also achieves some forms of fairness among clients. Finally, simulation results show that our proposed policy does achieve higher utility than all other compared policies.