Rate and Power Allocation in Fading Multiple Access Channels

We consider the problem of rate and power allocation in a fading multiple-access channel. Our objective is to obtain rate and power allocation policies that maximize a utility function defined over average transmission rates. In contrast with the literature, which focuses on the linear case, we present results for general concave utility functions. We consider two cases. In the first case, we assume that power control is possible and channel statistics are known. In this case, we show that the optimal policies can be obtained greedily by maximizing a linear utility function at each channel state. In the second case, we assume that power control is not possible and channel statistics are not available. In this case, we define a greedy rate allocation policy and provide upper bounds on the performance difference between the optimal and the greedy policy. Our bounds highlight the dependence of the performance difference on the channel variations and the structure of the utility function.Comment: 6 pages, In proc. of WiOpt 200

Information Theory vs. Queueing Theory for Resource Allocation in Multiple Access Channels

We consider the problem of rate allocation in a fading Gaussian multiple-access channel with fixed transmission powers. The goal is to maximize a general concave utility function of the expected achieved rates of the users. There are different approaches to this problem in the literature. From an information theoretic point of view, rates are allocated only by using the channel state information. The queueing theory approach utilizes the global queue-length information for rate allocation to guarantee throughput optimality as well as maximizing a utility function of the rates. In this work, we make a connection between these two approaches by showing that the information theoretic capacity region of a multiple-access channel and its stability region are equivalent. Moreover, our numerical results show that a simple greedy policy which does not use the queue-length information can outperform queue-length based policies in terms of convergence rate and fairness.Comment: 5 pages. In proc. of PIMRC 200