Rate allocation based on spectrum pricing function in collaborative transmission over heterogeneous wireless access networks

This article studied rate allocation in collaborative transmission over heterogeneous wireless access networks. With the introduced pricing function, which uses the occupied spectrum to describe the cost in data transmission, rate allocation is formulated as a concave optimization problem and the explicit solution has been obtained. Instead of transmitting through all available networks in pursuit of fairness, the proposed rate allocation scheme distributes traffic to available networks in an unbalanced way according to both spectral efficiency and network status. Simulation results have shown that compared with other methods, the new scheme can maximize the total utility gained in collaborative transmission and avoid congestion effectively.