Distributed resource allocation for proportional fairness in multi-band wireless systems

A challenging problem in multi-band multi-cell self-organized wireless systems, such as multi-channel Wi-Fi networks, femto/pico cells in 3G/4G cellular networks, and more recent wireless networks over TV white spaces, is of distributed resource allocation. This 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 sub-parts. We show that the first part, involving channel access and client scheduling, is convex and derive a distributed adaptation procedure for achieving 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.